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 22nd June 1919. At the outbreak of the second world war, he was studyingchemistry at the Sorbonne. He was called up into the French army and,a year later was captured by the Germans. They never discovered thathe was a Jew and so Tajfel survived the war in a series of Prisoner ofWar camps. However when he finally returned home he found that nearlyall his friends and family were dead. These experiences shaped hissubsequent career in three ways. First, he developed an abidinginterest in prejudice; second, he recognised that his fate was tiedentirely to his group identity; third, he understood that theHolocaust was not a product of psychology but of the way in whichpsychological processes operate within a given social and politicalcontext.In the immediate aftermath of the war, Tajfel worked with a number oforganisations, including the UN Refugee Organisation, to help rebuildthe lives of orphans and concentration camp survivors. But from 1946he started to study psychology and by 1954, now in the UK, he hadgraduated with a first class degree. His early work was part of the so-called 'new look' in social psychology and concerned processes ofperceptual overestimation. While it may seem remote from his laterintergroup research it was, however, concerned with the way in whichsocial values frame cognitive processes - or rather how psychologicalfunctioning shapes and is shaped by large-scale social processes. Hisempirical work was accompanied by trenchant critiques of reductionismand, in a telling phrase, he expresses his outrage at the way in whichpsychologists develop simplified models while displaying a 'blandindifference to all that one knew about human society'.In 1967, Tajfel took up his Chair in Social Psychology at BristolUniversity where he remained until his death in 1982. Shortly afterarriving he conducted the famous 'minimal group experiments'. Thesestudies, which were originally intended as a baseline from which onecould determine the necessary and sufficient conditions for collectiveprejudice, showed that mere categorisation can produce inter-groupdifferentiation. They led him, along with John Turner, to developsocial identity theory (SIT) - often represented as the idea that wedefine ourselves in terms of category memberships and then, in orderto achieve a positive self-definition, seek to advantage our ingroupover comparison outgroups.However, there is an irony here. Tajfel, who more than anyone elseinsisted on the need to view psychological processes in context, oftenfound the minimal group studies taken out of context and hence socialidentity theory interpreted in reductionist terms. For him SIT was notmeant to explain social inequalities in psychological terms but toexamine how psychological dynamics operate in and relate toideological and structural realities. The process of differentiationwas not an end point, but a starting point for his analysis. Thefundamental question was, if people seek positive social identities,what do they do if they are defined negatively in an unequal socialworld: as Jews in an anti-semitic world, blacks in a racist world,women in a sexist world? When do they act collectively to challengesuch inequalities? In other words, social identity theory is more atheory of social change than social discrimination and the concept ofsocial identity is primarily intended as a mediating concept in theexplanation of social change. This agenda is of fundamental importanceand continues to shape research. But Tajfel's triumph was moral aswell as intellectual. In the face of Nazi inhumanity, when it wouldhave been all too easy to succumb to fatalism and despair, Tajfel

retained his optimism in the ability of people to organise andovercome oppression.This optimism in organisation was reflected in many ways - EAESP beingone of them. After 1945 European intellectual life in general, andsocial psychology in particular, was scattered and fragmented andweak. From 1962 onwards, Tajfel was part of a small group from bothsides of the Atlantic who sought to form a community of EuropeanSocial Psychologists. One can enumerate his various formalcontributions: Tajfel was on the first committee of the EuropeanAssociation in 1966. He was its second president and, during his term,the European Journal of Social Psychology was formed. However none ofthis conveys Tajfel's true intellectual and practical contribution. AsJerome Bruner, amongst others, noted, he more than anyone else broughtEuropean Social Psychology into being. Moreover, he provided itsdistinctiveness and dynamism: a rejection of reductionism and acommitment to studying psychological processes in context; a concernwith social inequality along with an intellectual and moral commitmentto social change; an abiding interest in collective processes andcollective action as the motor of change. It is for these reasons thatTajfel is remembered and honoured and that his legacy remains soimportant for our future.