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This paper examines the role that social group processes, and multiple group membership in particular, play in supporting resilience and post‐traumatic growth following the experience of violence and abuse. Drawing on social identity theorizing, we develop and test a model that (a) predicts an association between multiple group membership and positive outcomes of resilience and post‐traumatic growth, and (b) explores mechanisms, of personal control and identification with anti‐violence activists, through which group membership might exert this effect. This model was tested using data from a sample of predominantly White South African adults recruited through numerous sources including a non‐government organisation that supports victims of violence and abuse (N = 112). Results showed that multiple group membership was positively related to post‐traumatic growth and provided a basis for enhanced personal control and identification with activists. Personal control also mediated the relationship between multiple group membership and resilience. We discuss the implications for theory and practice and suggest there is value in working with social group memberships following trauma to support recovery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on prejudice seeks to understand and transform inaccurate beliefs about others. Indeed, historically such research has offered a cautionary tale of the biased nature of human cognition. Recently, however, this view has been challenged by work defending the essential rationality of intergroup perception, a theme captured controversially in Jussim and colleagues' (2009) research on the 'unbearable accuracy of stereotyping'. The present paper argues that in its own terms the 'rationalist turn' in socio-cognitive research on stereotyping presents an important challenge to the prejudice tradition, raising troubling questions about its conceptual and empirical foundations. However, it also argues for the necessity of transcending those terms. By focusing on the correspondence between individual beliefs and the supposedly 'objective' characteristics of others, we neglect the historical and discursive practices through which the social realities that we 'perceive' are actively constructed and institutionalized. We mask their social origins, contested and perspectival nature, relativity, and relationship to wider structures of power. By implication, moving beyond the Allportian perspective that has dominated both the prejudice tradition and the emerging stereotype accuracy paradigm, we may now need to prioritize other kinds of questions. Reversing Allport's famous definition of prejudice, it may now be time to ask: How, and with what consequences, does 'thinking ill of others' become sufficiently warranted? How does such thinking become part of institutionalized relations of power and an accepted way of perceiving, evaluating and treating others? What should social psychologists be doing to challenge this state of affairs? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]