# Henri Tajfel **Henri Tajfel** (June 22, 1919 – May 3, 1982) was the Polish-born British social psychologist whose minimal-group experiments and [[Social Identity Theory]] are the foundation of the modern psychology of intergroup conflict. Born to a Jewish family in Włocławek, he was studying in Paris when the war began, served in the French army, and spent five years as a prisoner of war — surviving because his captors never established that he was a Polish Jew rather than a French one. His family was murdered in the Holocaust. After the war he worked resettling orphaned Jewish children for relief agencies before taking up psychology in Britain; from 1967 he built the social-psychology group at Bristol that produced the work below. The biography is the theory: a man whose life turned on a category he did not choose spent it studying what categories do. ## The minimal group experiments (1970–71) At Bristol, Tajfel and colleagues divided schoolboys into two groups on a trivial basis — a stated preference for paintings by Klee or by Kandinsky, or a coin toss — with no history, no contact and no competition between them, and then asked each boy to allocate points to anonymous others identified only by group. The boys favored their own group, and did so even when a different strategy would have given their own group *more* in absolute terms, so long as it gave the other group less. The [[Minimal Group Paradigm]] showed that the mere act of categorization produces in-group favoritism; [[Gordon Allport]]'s categorization thesis and [[Muzafer Sherif]]'s [[Realistic Conflict Theory]] had both assumed something more — a history, a stereotype, a scarce resource — was required. Nothing was. ## Social Identity Theory (1979) With John Turner, Tajfel generalized the result. People derive part of their self-concept from group membership; they categorize (self and others into groups), identify (adopt the group as part of the self), and compare (against out-groups, seeking *positive distinctiveness*). Because self-esteem is bound to the group's standing, threats to the group are threats to the self, and status can be defended by favoring the in-group, derogating the out-group, or — where the group's position is seen as illegitimate and unstable — by collective action to change it. [[Social Comparison Theory]] supplies the comparison mechanism; [[Ethnocentrism]] and [[Stigma]] are the outputs. The theory is now the standard account of everything from sports rivalry to sectarian war, and the vault's [[Pluralistic Ignorance]], [[Totemism and Sacred Objects]] and [[Clash of Civilizations]] pages all lean on it. ## A note on the man In 2019 documented evidence of Tajfel's persistent sexual harassment of female colleagues and students led the European Association of Social Psychology to remove his name from its senior award. The vault records this as it records the work. ## Why the vault cares Social identity theory is the mechanism behind the vault's most-used explanatory move: that political identity functions as *group membership defended for self-esteem*, so that facts which threaten the group are processed as attacks and rejected. [[Identity-Protective Cognition]] is the direct descendant; [[Normative Threat]] and [[The Authoritarian Dynamic]] are the authoritarianism-specific version; [[Social Dominance Theory]] and [[Dehumanization]] describe what happens when positive distinctiveness is pursued through hierarchy. Tajfel's own conclusion, drawn from the camps, was that the process was normal, cheap to trigger, and did not require hatred to start. ## See Also - [[Social Identity Theory]] · [[Minimal Group Paradigm]] · [[Social Comparison Theory]] · [[Ethnocentrism]] · [[Stigma]] - [[Gordon Allport]] · [[Muzafer Sherif]] · [[Realistic Conflict Theory]] · [[Social Dominance Theory]] · [[Dehumanization]] - [[Identity-Protective Cognition]] · [[Normative Threat]] · [[Prejudice]] · [[Psychology Hub]]