Henri Tajfel

Henri Tajfel (born June 22, 1919, Włocławek, Poland—died May 3, 1982, Oxford, United Kingdom) was a Polish-born British social psychologist, best known for his concept of social identity, a central idea in what became known as social identity theory. He is remembered in Europe for the effort he gave to establishing a European style of social psychology, one that recognized the social, political, and historical context within which social behaviour takes place.

Early life and career

Born into a Jewish family in Poland, Tajfel was a student at the Sorbonne in France when Germany invaded Poland in September 1939. A fluent French speaker, he served in the French army, was captured by the invading German forces in 1940, and spent the rest of the conflict as a prisoner of war. His survival depended on his assuming a French identity and concealing his Polish Jewish heritage.

All of Tajfel’s immediate family and most of his friends in Poland were killed in the Holocaust. After the war, he spent six years helping to rehabilitate war victims and refugees and to repatriate or resettle them in other countries. Those events affected him deeply and provided him with important intellectual signposts for his later research and writing on discrimination against minorities and on how identity is shaped by nationality and ethnic group membership. Regarding his own wartime experience, he observed that, had his Polish Jewish identity been revealed, his fate would have been determined by his social category.

Tajfel married in 1948 and moved to England in 1951. As an undergraduate student at Birkbeck, University of London, he won a scholarship for an essay on prejudice. He graduated in 1954, worked as a research assistant at the University of Durham, and later became a lecturer in social psychology at the University of Oxford. In 1967 he was appointed to a chair in social psychology at Bristol University, a post that he held until his death. Bristol soon became a European centre for research in social psychology.

Perceptual accentuation

Tajfel’s earliest published research was based on what was termed the “new look” in the theory of perception, which emphasized that perception is an active rather than a reactive process. People’s mental processes often organize everyday stimuli according to values or needs that are current or salient at that moment. For example, a meat eater who is very hungry might mistake a blurred photographic image of a red flower for a juicy steak.

Tajfel incorporated such ideas into his work on perceptual accentuation. In one study, the stimuli were eight lines that differed in length by a constant increment. He showed that a simple manipulation (labeling each line either A or B) in an experimental setting caused subjects to misperceive the lines’ lengths and to categorize them accordingly. The concept of accentuation fit with Tajfel’s thinking about social stereotypes: members of ethnic groups are misperceived to fit more closely to stereotypes commonly held about them.

An important development in Tajfel’s thinking was revealed in a 1970 paper, “Experiments in Intergroup Discrimination,” in which he explored the concept of social categorization (the classification of people as members of social groups) as a basis for intergroup discrimination (discrimination by members of one group against members of another group). In contrast to realistic group-conflict theory, according to which intergroup conflict derives from mutually incompatible goals, Tajfel proposed that the simple act of becoming a group member is sufficient to precipitate discrimination against members of an available comparison out-group. Thus, intergroup conflict is the result of social categorization rather than competition for tangible rewards. In Tajfel’s view, social categorization, not intergroup competition, is the key to incipient prejudice.

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Social identity and intergroup relations

Tajfel and his student John Turner developed social identity theory in the 1970s. Among the key ideas of social identity theory are the following:

1. Social categorization is a cognitive tool. It is a more powerful determinant of intergroup discrimination than are individual-level variables, such as personality characteristics, which might be shared by both in-group and out-group members. The key to understanding out-group prejudice is that individuals know that they are members of discrete categories—i.e., groups.

2. Social comparison is an intergroup concept, giving rise to inferences based on group membership. For example, Jane decides that she is advantaged by her ethnicity because it confers a higher status when she makes comparisons with other salient ethnic groups. Tajfel’s concept of social comparison contrasts with that of the American cognitive psychologist Leon Festinger, who posited an individual-level concept giving rise to inferences based on interpersonal comparisons. For example, Jim concludes that he is fast because he usually wins footraces against other individuals.

3. Social identity is a crucial aspect of identity. It is part of the self concept and is derived from the knowledge that one belongs to one or more social groups, such as a political or religious group. An individual strives to achieve positive self-definition, an outcome based on comparisons that advantage the in-group over salient out-groups.

4. Tajfel’s concept of social change is thought by some to be his most innovative contribution to social identity theory. Social change is a significant perceived alteration in the relationship between large social groups, such as national, religious, and ethnic groups. Whereas social mobility is a change in self-definition—as when an individual moves into a new group—social change applies to a transformation of social identity for an entire social group. Social change is the process by which people actively seek positive social identities in response to being defined negatively in a world of social inequality.

Tajfel drew widely on theory and examples from history, literature, sociology, politics, and economics in elaborating his ideas. He went to considerable lengths to link social identity theory to large-scale social structures and to ideology. Unlike many theorists in social psychology, Tajfel made a deliberate connection with collective movements and political action.

Although Tajfel conducted experimental research and encouraged others to do the same, his goals were more ambitious, and he was explicitly opposed to reductionism in social psychological theory. He was mindful of the scope and magnitude of North American social psychology and what it had achieved in defining the discipline in the 20th century. However, he was convinced that a European perspective could offer something different and valuable. He argued that North American social psychologists were mostly reductionist, even myopic, in their pursuit of psychological laws that applied primarily to individuals rather than to groups. In contrast, Europe’s political history and wars created a need for theoretical constructs that were embedded in social groups.