Roccas & Brewer (2002) Social identity complexity

Roccas, S. & Brewer, M. B. (2002). Social identity complexity. Personality and Social Psychology Review 6: 88–106. 

• Most researchers who study social identification agree in principle that people have multiple group identities, but there has been relatively little research on the nature of the relationships among a particular person’s numerous ingroup identities or on the effects of holding multiple social identities on intergroup attitudes in general.
• There are multiple ways in which a person may construct the definition of an ingroup given this wide set of social identities. These include:
• Intersection. Requiring all social identities to be simultaneously held (e.g. only women lawyers, not all women nor all lawyers).
• Dominance. One superordinate category. Thus, all lawyers, whether women or not.
• Compartmentalization. Here, social identities are context- or situation-specific. In one setting, one group membership becomes the primary basis of social identity, and other group identities become primary in different contexts. For example, at the office, one’s professional identity may be primary and shared identities based on sex, ethnicity, religion, etc. are irrelevant. At home, however, religious affiliation may be the most important.
• Merger. Ingroup identification is extended to others who share any of one’s important social category memberships—social identity is the sum of one’s combined group identifications. For the female lawyer, her identification with women as a social group crosses the boundary of lawyer and non-lawyer, and her identification with lawyers crosses the sex divide; therefore, both identity groups are important and salient across situations. A consequence of this kind of attitude is that the more social identities an individual has, the more inclusive the definition of ingroup becomes, to the point where no sharp ingroup–outgroup distinctions are made on any dimension and all others are evaluated equivalently.
• Cognitive complexity (Tetlock 1983) is characterized by both differentiation and integration of potentially conflicting beliefs and values. The level of differentiation reflects the degree to which inconsistencies are recognized (rather than denied or suppressed); integration reflects the level of resolution or reconciliation between recognized inconsistencies.
• NOTE: This is pretty vague and wishy-washy.
• From another paper (van Hiel & Mervielde 2003): High complexity indicates that a decision-maker carefully weighs all the relevant perspectives on an issue and then integrates them into a coherent position. Low complexity, in contrast, indicates that only one viewpoint is considered, which is maintained with dogmatic tenacity.
• The theory here orders the four modes of representation of multiple social identities along a continuum from least to most complex.
• Intersection is the least complex form because it reduces multiple, potentially diverse, group identities to a single, highly exclusive social identity.
• Dominance is also on the low-complexity end of the continuum because it suppresses inconsistencies within a single ingroup–outgroup dichotomization.
• Compartmentalization represents the next level of complexity in that separate identities are acknowledged and differentiated, but without any attempt at reconciliation.
• Merger represents the highest level of complexity because it preserves both differentiation and integration in an inclusive social identity.
• Having a complex social identity is dependent on two conditions: first, awareness of more than one ingroup categorization and second, recognition that the multiple ingroup categories do not converge.
• Social identity complexity.
• Intersection and dominance can, in general, be classified as relatively low-complexity representations and compartmentalization and merger as relatively high complexity.
• Low complexity means that multiple identities are subjectively embedded in a single ingroup representation, whereas high complexity involves acknowledgment of differentiation and difference between ingroup categories.
• Self-complexity refers to the structure of the perception of personal attributes, whereas social identity complexity refers to the structure of the perception of ingroups.
• NOTE: So, this is again really about the conceptualization of social identity. This of course relates to how social identity is expressed, but it is fundamentally different.