Commitment, Identity Salience, and Role Behavior: Theory and Research Example

Abstract

The generic, indeed the defining, task of social psychology is to investigate the interrelationships among society, the social person, and social behavior. Every theoretical perspective or framework in social psychology approaches this immense task by narrowing it, by selecting particular dimensions of society, persons, and behavior as especially worthy of attention. While the ultimate goal for social psychology may be a single, unified theoretical framework sufficiently comprehensive to incorporate “all” the “important” aspects, etc., of the defining conceptual variables of social psychology,1 that goal is not in sight. In the meantime, and before the millenium, all social psychological perspectives or frameworks are partial, selective in their approaches to the world they hope to explicate. That assertion is true of symbolic interactionism, the theoretical framework out of which the theory examined in this chapter develops, although perhaps less so than for most contemporary frameworks in social psychology.