Henri Tajfel

Henri Tajfel (formerly Hersz Mordche) (22 June 1919 Włocławek, Poland – 3 May 1982 in Bristol, UK) was a British social psychologist, best known as the principal co-developer of Social Identity Theory.

Biography

Henri Tajfel was the son of a Polish Jewish businessman. He began his career by studying chemistry at the Sorbonne, but at the outbreak of the Second World War was called up into the French army. A year later, he was captured by the Germans. They never discovered that he was a Jew, so Tajfel survived the war in a series of Prisoner-of-war camps.

On his return home he discovered that none of his immediate family, and few of his friends, had survived the Nazi Holocaust. It has been speculated that this experience had a profound impact on Tajfel's later work on ingroups and outgroups, since Tajfel had managed to survive the Holocaust by pretending to be a member of another ethnic group.

After the war Tajfel worked first for international relief organizations including the United Nations' International Refugee Organization, to help rebuild the lives of orphans and concentration camp survivors. From 1946 he then began studying psychology, and by 1954 he had graduated in the UK with a degree in psychology.

Afterwards he applied for British nationality with his wife and their two sons, which he was granted in 1957. His research work at the University of Oxford was on different areas of social psychology, including the social psychology of prejudice and nationalism. Following two research visits in the USA, in 1967 he was made Chair of Social Psychology at the University of Bristol, until his death from cancer in 1982.

Work in Social Psychology

Tajfel is perhaps best known for his minimal groups experiments. In these studies, test subjects were divided arbitrarily into two groups, based on a trivial and almost completely irrelevant basis. Participants did not know other members of the group, did not even know who they were, and had no reason to expect that they would interact with them in the future. Still, members of both groups began to identify themselves with their group, preferring other members of their group and favoring them with rewards that maximized their own group's outcomes.

Subsequently, Tajfel and his student John Turner developed the theory of social identity. They proposed that people have an inbuilt tendency to categorize themselves into one or more ingroups, building a part of their identity on the basis of membership of that group and enforcing boundaries with other groups.

Social identity theory suggests that people identify with groups in such a way as to "maximize positive distinctiveness"; groups offer both identity (they tell us who we are) and self-esteem (they make us feel good about ourselves). The theory of social identity has had a very substantial impact on many areas of social psychology, including group dynamics, intergroup relations, prejudice and stereotyping, and organizational psychology.

Bibliography

*Tajfel, H. (1959). Quantitative judgment in social perception. "British Journal of Psychology, 50", 16-29.
*Tajfel, H. (1969). Cognitive aspects of prejudice. "Journal of Social Issues, 25", 79-97.
*Tajfel, H. (1970). Experiments in intergroup discrimination. "Scientific American, 223", 96-102.
*Tajfel, H. (1972). La catégorisation sociale. In S. Moscovici (Ed.), "Introduction à la psychologie sociale" (Vol. 1). Paris : Larousse.
*Tajfel, H., Billig, M., Bundy, R. P. & Flament, C. (1971). Social categorization and intergroup behaviour. "European Journal of Social Psychology, 2", 149-178.
*Tajfel, H. (1974). Social identity and intergroup behaviour. "Social Science Information, 13", 65-93.
*Tajfel, H. (Ed.). (1978). "Differentiation between social groups: Studies in the social psychology of intergroup relations". London: Academic Press.
*Tajfel, H. & Turner, J. C. (1979). An Integrative Theory of Intergroup Conflict. In W. G. Austin & S. Worchel (Eds.), "The Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations". Monterey, CA: Brooks-Cole .
*Tajfel, H. (1981). "Human Groups and Social Categories". Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
*Tajfel, H. (1982). Social psychology of intergroup relations. "Annual Review of Psychology, 33", 1-39.
*Tajfel, H. & Turner, J. C. (1986). The social identity theory of inter-group behavior. In S. Worchel & L. W. Austin (Eds.), "Psychology of Intergroup Relations". Chigago: Nelson-Hall

External links

* [http://www.eaesp.org/activities/own/awards/tajfel.htm Biography] from the European Association of Experimental Social Psychology