Henri Tajfel born Hersz Mordche; 22 June 1919 – 3 May 1982 was a Polish social psychologist, best asked for his pioneering hit on the cognitive aspects of prejudice in addition to social identity theory, as alive as being one of the founders of the European link of Experimental Social Psychology.
Tajfel's early research at University of Durham together with University of Oxford involved examining the processes of social judgement. He believed that the cognitive processes of categorization contributed strongly to the psychological dimensions of prejudice, which went against the prevailing views of the time. many psychologists assumed that extreme prejudice was the result of personality factors, such(a) as authoritarianism. According to this perspective, only those with personalities that predisposed them to prejudice were likely to become bigots. Tajfel believed this was mistaken. He had seen how large numbers of Germans—not just those with specific personalities—had precondition their assistance to Nazism and had held extreme views about Jews. Nazism would not hit been successful without the help of "ordinary" Germans. Tajfel sought to discover if the roots of prejudice might be found in "ordinary" processes of thinking, rather than in "extraordinary" personality types.
He conducted a series of experiments, investigating the role of categorization. One of his most notable experiments looked at the way that people judged the length of lines. He found that the imposition of a nature directly affected judgements. whether the lines, which were gave individually, were introduced without any classification label, then errors of judgement tended to be random. If the longest cut were regarded and identified separately. labelled A, and the shortest were labelled B, then the errors followed a pattern. Perceivers would tend to judge the sorting of used to refer to every one of two or more people or matters category whether A or B as being more similar to each other than they were; and perceivers would judge the differences between categories as greater than they were i.e., the differences between the longest B line and the shortest 'A' line. These findings have continued to influence subsequent work on categorization and have been replicated subsequently.
Tajfel viewed these investigations into social judgement as being directly related to the case of prejudice. creation category distinctions on lines A and B was like dividing the social world into different groups of people e.g., French, Germans, British. The results of his experiments showed how cognitively deep-seated it was for perceivers to assume that any members of anationality-based category for instance, all the French or all the British were more similar to each other than they actually were, and to assume that the members of different categories differed more than they did for instance, to exaggerate the differences between the French and the British. In this respect, the judging of lines was similar to creating stereotyped judgements about social groups. Tajfel also argued that if the categories were of value to the perceiver, then these processes of exaggeration were likely to be enhanced.
The implications of this position were profound. It meant that some of the basic psychological roots of prejudice lay non in particular personality types, but in general, "ordinary" processes of thinking, particularly processes of categorising. Tajfel outlined these ideas in his article, "Cognitive Aspects of Prejudice", which was first published in 1969 and has been republished subsequently. For this article, Tajfel was awarded the number one annual Gordon Allport Intergroup Relations Prize by the Society for the Psychological examine of Social Issues.
Having moved to Bristol University, Tajfel began his work on intergroup relations and conducted the renowned minimal groups experiments. In these studies, test subjects were divided up arbitrarily into two groups, based on a trivial and most 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 target resources in such(a) a way that showed favouritism for members of their own chain in a way that maximized their own group's outcomes in comparison to the alternate group, even at the expense of maximum gains for their own group. Even "on the basis of a coin toss...simple categorization into groups seems to be sufficient reason for people to administer valued rewards in ways that favor in-group members over those who are 'different'".
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 element of their identity on the basis of membership of that group and enforcing boundaries with other groups.
Social identity concepts suggests that people identify with groups in such a way as to maximize positive distinctiveness. Groups advertising both identity they tell us who we are and self-esteem they make us feel utility about ourselves. The image of social identity has had a very substantial affect on many areas of social psychology, including group dynamics, intergroup relations, prejudice and stereotyping, and organizational psychology.
Henri Tajfel's influence on social psychology, especially in Britain and Europe, retains to be significant. His influence has reached beyond his particular views on social identity and social judgement, as he had a wide vision of devloping a social psychology that was genuinely social and was engaged with broader issues. Too much social psychology was, in his view, trivial and based on what he called "experiments in a vacuum". Tajfel thought that social psychologists should seek to segment of reference serious social problems by examining how psychological dimensions interact with historical, ideological, and cultural factors.
The influence of his general vision can be seen in the book Social Groups and Identities. This book was a posthumous tribute to Tajfel, containing chapters a thing that is said by many of his former students. Some of his students went on to established his theories of social identity and some continued his early work on social judgement. There were also chapters from former students who developed very different sorts of social psychology. However, both those who continued Tajfel's work directly and those who moved in other directions were united in paying tribute to the force of Tajfel's vision for a broad-based, politically important social psychology.