Revisiting social identity theory from a neuroscience perspective

•Insights from social neuroscience can illuminate and refine social identity theory.•Neuroscience research on categorization, self-group overlap, ingroup bias, and coping with social identity threat are discussed.•Neuroscience methods provide certain advantages above traditional (self-report) methods employed in social identity research.•Neuroscience models help to generate new research questions regarding social identity.

Social Identity Theory (SIT) is one of the most influential perspectives on intergroup relations. We discuss how different neuroscientific models and methods (EEG, fMRI, cardiovascular measures) can illuminate insights into four core social identity constructs and processes: Social categorization, self-group overlap, ingroup bias, and coping with threat. We describe neuroscientific research that provides converging evidence for SIT. More specifically, we propose that social neuroscience provides more direct measures for core SIT-constructs (e.g., categorization, threat) that are difficult to measure with self-report measures, and refines SIT by identifying more subtle forms of ingroup bias in ‘upstream’ neural processing, and by testing more dynamic relationships between SIT constructs (e.g., considering categorization as a dependent variable, or examining social identity ‘challenge’, in addition to threat).