It is primarily through our identification with social groups that we define ourselves.

The statement that people define themselves primarily through our identification with social groups is indeed true. Admittedly, during certain stages of life people often appear to define themselves in other terms. Yet during these stages the fundamental need to define one’s self through one’s social association is merely masked or suspended.

Any developmental psychologists would agree that socialization with other children is critical in a child’s understanding and psychological development of self. At any day-care centre or kindergarten class, children quickly learn that they want to play with the same toys at the same time or in the same ways as some children. Children come to understand generally what they share in common with certain of their peers – in appearance, behaviour, like and dislikes – and what they do not share in common with other peers or older students and adults. In other words, they learn to recognize that their identification inextricably involves their kinship with some peers and alienation from others.

As children progress to the social world of playground or after-school venues, their initial recognition that they relate more closely to some children than to others evolves into a desire to form well-defined social groups, and to set these groups apart from the others. Girls begin to congregate apart from the boys; clubs and cliques are quickly formed – often with exclusive rituals, codes and rules to further distinguish the group members from other children. This apparent need to be a part of an exclusive group continues through high school, where children indentify themselves in their yearbooks by the clubs to which they belonged. Even in college, students eagerly join clubs, fraternities and sororities to establish their identity as members of an exclusive group. Children are not taught by adults to behave in this way. Rather, this desire to identify one’s self with an exclusive social group seems to spring from an innate psychological need to define one’s self through one’s personal affiliations.

However, as young adults take the responsibilities of partnering, parenting and working, they appear to define themselves less by their social associations and more by their marital status, paternal status and occupation. The last of these criteria seems particularly important for adults today. When two adults meet for the first time, beyond initial pleasantries, the initial question almost invariably is: “What do you do for a living?” Yet, this shift in focus from one’s belonging to a social group to one’s occupation is not the shift in how people prefer to define themselves. This shift is rather born out of economic necessity: people don’t have the leisure time or financial independence to concern themselves with purely social activities. A quite telling fact is that when older people retire from the world of working, an interest in identifying with social groups – be they investment clubs, bridge clubs or country clubs – seems to reemerge. In short, humans seem possessed by an enduring need to be a part of a distinct social group – a need that continues throughout the life’s journey.

In conclusion, people gain and maintain their sense of self through their belongings to social groups. Admittedly, there may be loners who prefer not to belong, for whatever reasons; yet loners are the exception. Also, while some working individuals might temporarily prefer to define themselves in terms of occupation for practicality’s sake; at bottom, humans are nothing if not social animal.