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consequences separate from those of patriotism and American values.
In this section, I will test what effects American identity has drawing on the social
identity literature, particularly from the Amsterdam school, outlined above. The psychological
research suggests there are three areas in which identity strength will have important
consequences for people’s attitudes and behaviors: how oriented they are toward the group; how
cooperative they are toward fellow group members; and how willing they are to be critical of
their group’s actions and to feel shame for their group’s behaviors. I will consider each
consequence in turn.
Group-Orientation and American Identity
According to the social identity literature discussed above, high identifiers are more likely
than low identifiers to view ingroup members as a group rather than as distinct individuals. We
can therefore expect that people who identify strongly with the American people would be more
likely to view Americans as a cohesive whole, one that is relatively homogeneous and
consensual. Figure 3 provides evidence to support these speculations. Looking first at the
respondents who believe Americans are a homogeneous lot, strong identifiers are significantly
overrepresented compared to weak identifiers. Strong identifiers constitute 46 percent of this
group of respondents compared to only 25 percent of weak identifiers. An even starker contrast
can be seen in appraisals of consensus. Only 15 percent of weak identifiers think Americans
agree with each other almost all of the time, whereas over half of strong identifiers hold this
view.
[Figure 3 about here]
Convention