Too much of social psychology consists of experiments in a vacuum.
Psychologists
Henri Tajfel
Polish-born British social psychologist (1919-1982) and a Holocaust survivor who lost most of his immediate family to the Nazis. The shock of returning to Poland after the war to find his world destroyed became the explicit origin of his research program on the cognitive sources of prejudice and intergroup relations. He spent the 1950s rebuilding his life through resettlement work for Jewish orphans, then studied psychology at Birkbeck before moving to Durham, Oxford, and from 1967 the Chair of Social Psychology at Bristol. The 1971 minimal-group experiments and the social identity theory developed with his student John Turner reshaped late-twentieth-century social psychology. He co-founded the European Association of Experimental Social Psychology. In 2018-19, sustained sexual harassment of female lab members was documented, prompting the EASP to rename its award.
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Henri Tajfel's Other Quotes
Social categorization can be considered as a process of bringing together social objects or events in groups which are equivalent with regard to an individual's actions, intentions and system of beliefs.
The mere awareness of the presence of an out-group is sufficient to provoke intergroup competitive or discriminatory responses on the part of the in-group.
Discrimination on the basis of categorization in terms of either Klee or Kandinsky is in itself sufficient to cause significant in-group preference.
Social identity is that part of an individual's self-concept which derives from his knowledge of his membership of a social group together with the value and emotional significance attached to that membership.
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