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Children, young people and families, Relationships and romance

Children and social identity

Mark Bennett delivered the Michael Argyle Lecture at the Society’s 2004 Annual Conference.

18 September 2004

The structures and processes underlying the self and human identity are as fundamental to psychological inquiry as it is possible to imagine. These topics have occupied social psychology's centre stage for a century, but, interestingly, the same cannot be said with respect to developmental psychology. Despite significant early statements from Baldwin (1895), James (1890), Cooley (1902) and Mead (1934) on the origins and development of self and identity, relatively little work has addressed children's identities.

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