Biography of Henri Tajfel (1919-1982)

Ref. http://www.eaesp.org/activities/own/awards/tajfel.htm
(by Steve Reicher, University of St-Andrews, Scotland)
Henri Tajfel, of Polish-Jewish parentage, was born in Wloclawek on 22
nd June 1919. At the outbreak of the second world war, he was studying
chemistry at the Sorbonne. He was called up into the French army and,
a year later was captured by the Germans. They never discovered that
he was a Jew and so Tajfel survived the war in a series of Prisoner of
War camps. However when he finally returned home he found that nearly
all his friends and family were dead. These experiences shaped his
subsequent career in three ways. First, he developed an abiding
interest in prejudice; second, he recognised that his fate was tied
entirely to his group identity; third, he understood that the
Holocaust was not a product of psychology but of the way in which
psychological processes operate within a given social and political
context.
In the immediate aftermath of the war, Tajfel worked with a number of
organisations, including the UN Refugee Organisation, to help rebuild
the lives of orphans and concentration camp survivors. But from 1946
he started to study psychology and by 1954, now in the UK, he had
graduated with a first class degree. His early work was part of the socalled 'new look' in social psychology and concerned processes of
perceptual overestimation. While it may seem remote from his later
intergroup research it was, however, concerned with the way in which
social values frame cognitive processes - or rather how psychological
functioning shapes and is shaped by large-scale social processes. His
empirical work was accompanied by trenchant critiques of reductionism
and, in a telling phrase, he expresses his outrage at the way in which
psychologists develop simplified models while displaying a 'bland
indifference to all that one knew about human society'.
In 1967, Tajfel took up his Chair in Social Psychology at Bristol
University where he remained until his death in 1982. Shortly after
arriving he conducted the famous 'minimal group experiments'. These
studies, which were originally intended as a baseline from which one
could determine the necessary and sufficient conditions for collective
prejudice, showed that mere categorisation can produce inter-group
differentiation. They led him, along with John Turner, to develop
social identity theory (SIT) - often represented as the idea that we
define ourselves in terms of category memberships and then, in order
to achieve a positive self-definition, seek to advantage our ingroup
over comparison outgroups.
However, there is an irony here. Tajfel, who more than anyone else
insisted on the need to view psychological processes in context, often
found the minimal group studies taken out of context and hence social
identity theory interpreted in reductionist terms. For him SIT was not
meant to explain social inequalities in psychological terms but to
examine how psychological dynamics operate in and relate to
ideological and structural realities. The process of differentiation
was not an end point, but a starting point for his analysis. The
fundamental question was, if people seek positive social identities,
what do they do if they are defined negatively in an unequal social
world: as Jews in an anti-semitic world, blacks in a racist world,
women in a sexist world? When do they act collectively to challenge
such inequalities? In other words, social identity theory is more a
theory of social change than social discrimination and the concept of
social identity is primarily intended as a mediating concept in the
explanation of social change. This agenda is of fundamental importance
and continues to shape research. But Tajfel's triumph was moral as
well as intellectual. In the face of Nazi inhumanity, when it would
have been all too easy to succumb to fatalism and despair, Tajfel

retained his optimism in the ability of people to organise and

overcome oppression.
This optimism in organisation was reflected in many ways - EAESP being
one of them. After 1945 European intellectual life in general, and
social psychology in particular, was scattered and fragmented and
weak. From 1962 onwards, Tajfel was part of a small group from both
sides of the Atlantic who sought to form a community of European
Social Psychologists. One can enumerate his various formal
contributions: Tajfel was on the first committee of the European
Association in 1966. He was its second president and, during his term,
the European Journal of Social Psychology was formed. However none of
this conveys Tajfel's true intellectual and practical contribution. As
Jerome Bruner, amongst others, noted, he more than anyone else brought
European Social Psychology into being. Moreover, he provided its
distinctiveness and dynamism: a rejection of reductionism and a
commitment to studying psychological processes in context; a concern
with social inequality along with an intellectual and moral commitment
to social change; an abiding interest in collective processes and
collective action as the motor of change. It is for these reasons that
Tajfel is remembered and honoured and that his legacy remains so
important for our future.