Sociologically, we’re each thought to have a collection of different social groups that we identify with, contrast ourselves with, and orient around in various ways.
These social groups allow us to experience a sense of belonging, help us to refine our conception of personal identity, and play a role in our establishment of goals, perception of right and wrong, and awareness of possibilities and potentialities.
If you envision the people making up these social groups as planets orbiting a star—the star being you and the planets being other people—our primary social groups made up of our blood relatives, social and chosen kin, best friends, and our geographic neighbors will typically be the planets orbiting quite close to the sun.
This inner-ring of relationships plays a vital role in providing a sense of security, support, love, and encouragement, alongside the seeds of what eventually becomes our personal identity: we understand ourselves, fundamentally, through our relationships with these most-present, most-engaged-with people.
Further out, occupying orbits more distant from that central star, but not so far out that they’re completely beyond its gravitational influence—and not so far out that they don’t likewise influence that central star—are secondary social groups that are typically more transient, but which can nonetheless refine, hone, shape, and at times fracture a person’s self-perception, understanding of themselves and the world, and ultimately, their personality and identity.
These secondary social groups tend to be less influential than a person’a primary relationships, but they do still have clout, and it’s thought that people who have relatively less potent primary social groups will sometimes be more influenced by these secondary social groups. So someone who is not close with their family and who doesn’t have significant best friends in their lives may be more heavily influenced by their colleagues at work, other people who share their political affiliations, or the folks they see once a week at pub trivia.
A reference group is a special category that overlaps both primary and secondary social groups, and it refers to a collection of people to whom that central person compares and contrasts themself, or to whom they are compared by an external entity.
So if I have close friends and family, and a collection of secondary friendships with people I like and with whom I share interests and habits and ideologies and norms, my reference group would be the people within that complete collection of relationships to whom I compare myself in various ways.
It might be the neighbor who makes more money than me, and with whom, as a consequence, I measure my professional performance, hoping to someday catch up and have what they have.
It might be the uncle who always seemed very interesting and wise, and whom, as a consequence, I look up to and hope to someday understand more completely.
It might be the leader of my church or mosque, who I respect as a pillar of moral authority, and whose standards for such things I take quite seriously, asking myself what that person would do when I’m uncertain about how to behave.
Reference groups are also used by sociologists, demographers, census-takers, and other aggregators-of-data for the purpose of making comparisons between different groups, and between individuals within the same group.
These reference groups, then, are useful for each of us in that they provide us with examples to use in figuring out who we are, what we believe, and how we should behave.
But they also provide advertisers a means of nudging us toward a particular purchase by identifying our reference groups and our aspirations within those contexts. They can then make claims about how those ambitions will be forwarded if we buy their snazzy whatever, and their sales pitch is more likely to work if they’re able to accurately figure out how we fit within these reference groups.
Demographers, likewise, can utilize such groupings to label intelligible but previously unidentified collections of people who share important interests, ambitions, or values, and sociologists can use these groups to point at behaviors that are invisible at the individual scale, but which become more overt when looking at the same people in the context of these groups.
Interestingly, we needn’t be part of a particular group to use them as a reference in this way, and we needn’t know a person to include them in one of our reference groups.
The “referencing” that we do is observational and interpretative, which means we can include a rich person we’ve never met, but who’s behaviors we’re aware of, in one of our aspirational reference groups, just as we can include a historical figure who died hundreds of years before we were born in one of our morality-focused reference groups.
These groups serve as blueprints for our internal sense of ourselves and how we interface with the world.
They also serve as a mechanism for sorting people into legible collectives that make group behaviors more predictable and potentially useful.
Reference groups heavily influence our perception of the world, as they help us both understand how things work, and who we should and should not be.
Our understanding of other people can likewise be informed by the reference groups they’re organized into. Sometimes our perception of someone else’s affiliations will allow us to see them more clearly, while in other cases such assumptions lead to more potent misunderstandings.
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