Multiple social identities cloud norm perception: Responses to COVID-19 among university aged Republicans and Democrats

Abstract

Most work on social identity, defined as one’s sense of self derived from membership to social groups, focuses on a single identity and its behavioural consequences. But a central insight of social identity theory is that people belong to multiple social groups, derive self-esteem from multiple identities and care to conform to the norms for those identities. However, very little work has turned its attention to understanding when and how multiple social identities interact. We motivate hypotheses with a framework that extends a social identity model to include multiple identities. Using a longitudinal sample (N > 600) of university students located throughout the US, we use university social identity, and the associated university norms, to characterize COVID related social distancing norms between April and October of 2020 and then unpack how another identity, the student’s political identity, impacts perception of those norms. Despite incentives to do otherwise, we find that beliefs about university norms differ depending on the respondent’s political identity. We relate our results back to a model of social identity.

Significance Statement: During the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, norms surrounding precautionary behavior, i.e. hand washing, mask wearing, and so on, quickly emerged and subsequently became highly politicized. In this study, we find evidence that political identity affects one’s ability to perceive university-level norms even when there are incentives in place to focus on those norms and when there are, through government enforced restrictions, forces coordinating behaviour. These results suggest that one’s identities may impact each other, such that one identity obscures an actor’s ability to accurately perceive the norms of another identity, even when there are salient incentives for accurate judgment.