Dominant endogroup

Dominance here is measured from the person outward rather than by the size or power of the group. Everyone belongs to several endogroups, and the dominant one is whichever holds them most deeply in its reality or has taken most of their will, which means the dominant endogroup differs from person to person inside the same society. It is also distinct from the authoritative endogroup, which is the one with enough coercive force to define reality, morality, norms and law. A state can be authoritative for everyone in a country while a family, a church or a workplace is dominant for a given individual, and the friction between the two is one of the three conflicts Marsh names as producing cognitive dissonance. There is a practical test. Ask who you would die for, or who you would give your last cookie to, and the answer identifies the endogroups that are most dominant for you. Marsh offers this as a tool for people trying to shift someone's allegiance, since appeals that reference the dominant endogroup have force where appeals to the authoritative one do not. Her distinction between shame and guilt cultures rests on the same variable, family and society being dominant in the first and the state or economic institutions in the second. The concept also predicts targets, since the first victims of autogenocide are usually the negative images of the dominant endogroups.

Social identity theory after Henri Tajfel and John Turner describes people holding multiple group identities of varying salience, with salience shifting by context, which is the nearest existing parallel. Reference group theory in sociology asks which group a person measures themselves against, and Charles Cooley's primary groups and Georg Simmel's web of group affiliations both address the multiplicity. Marsh's version differs by making the ranking a matter of sublation rather than of identification. What determines dominance is not which group a person feels most like a member of but which has taken the most of their will, which turns a question about identity into a question about where their capacity to choose has gone.