  Motivated by recent works in the communication and psychology literature, we
model and study the role social identity -- a person's sense of belonging to a
group -- plays in human information consumption. A hallmark of Social Identity
Theory (SIT) is the notion of 'status', i.e., an individual's desire to enhance
their and their 'in-group's' utility relative to that of an 'out-group'. In the
context of belief formation, this comes off as a desire to believe positive
news about the in-group and negative news about the out-group, which has been
empirically shown to support belief in misinformation and false news.
  We model this phenomenon as a Stackelberg game being played over an
information channel between a news-source (sender) and news-consumer
(receiver), with the receiver incorporating the 'status' associated with social
identity in their utility, in addition to accuracy. We characterize the
strategy that must be employed by the sender to ensure that its message is
trusted by receivers of all identities while maximizing their overall quality
of information. We show that, as a rule, this optimal quality of information at
equilibrium decreases when a receiver's sense of identity increases. We further
demonstrate how extensions of our model can be used to quantitatively estimate
the level of importance given to identity in a population.
