A Functionalist Account of Social Identity

-----

People use identity categories for adaptive decision making and strategically employ signals of identity for a variety of functions. Smaldino will argue that adopting a functional view of identity for communication and behavior allows us to more clearly focus on the forces that shape their use. He will first show how signals of social identity often encode meaningful information for decision making. He will then review specific perspectives on how selection by consequences has shaped the use of identity signals to more adaptively facilitate social learning, partner choice, and coordination, followed by a consideration of how those uses have changed in a world characterized by diversity, anonymity and the Internet, and political polarization.

-----