Social Identity of East Germans: The Process of Unification between East and West Germany as a Challenge to Cope with “Negative Social Identity”

Since the classic Sherif-Experiments in the 1950s there have been theories in social psychology which dealt especially with intergroup processes and emphasised the fundamentally different nature of interpersonal and intergroup behaviour. Examples are: Theory of Realistic Group Conflict (Sherif, 1966), Theory of Relative Deprivation (Gurr, 1970; Crosby, 1976; Runciman, 1966) and of course the well known Social Identity Theory (SIT); (Tajfel, 1978; Tajfel and Turner, 1986).