Henri Tajfel

Henri Tajfel (Włocławek, 1919 – Bristol, 1982) was a Polish-born social psychologist who became a British citizen. He is best known for his pioneering work on the cognitive roots of prejudice and for developing social identity theory, which still shapes how psychologists explain intergroup behaviour.

Born into a Jewish family, he left Poland to study chemistry at the Sorbonne, since Jewish students faced severe restrictions at Polish universities. When the Second World War broke out, he joined the French army, and a year later he was captured by the Germans. He concealed his Jewish origin by claiming to be French, though he never denied being Jewish. He survived the war, but on his return he learned that almost his entire family had perished in the Holocaust. He then worked for humanitarian agencies, including the OSE, which resettled Jewish children who had lost their families.

He settled in Britain, studied psychology at Birkbeck College and taught at Durham and Oxford before becoming professor at Bristol in 1967. He died in 1982 in an air accident.

His early research challenged the view that extreme prejudice came mainly from personality traits. Tajfel argued that ordinary processes of categorisation were enough to generate bias, a conclusion he drew partly from the way many ordinary Germans backed the Nazis. His line-judgement experiments showed that category labels distorted perception, exaggerating similarities within groups and differences between them. At Bristol, his minimal group experiments showed that even an arbitrary division led people to favour their own group. With his student John Turner, he developed social identity theory, which holds that we seek a positive distinctiveness for our groups to gain identity and self-esteem.

His influence remains strong, especially in British and European social psychology, in areas such as group dynamics, stereotyping and organisational psychology. He called for a socially engaged discipline that addressed real problems in society.