Henri Tajfel

Henri Tajfel (formerly Hersz Mordche) (born 22 June 1919 Włocławek, Poland, died 3 May 1982 in Bristol, UK) was a British social psychologist, best known as the principal co-developer of Social Identity Theory.

Biography
Henri Tajfel was the son of a Polish Jewish businessman. He began his career by studying chemistry at the Sorbonne, but at the outbreak of the Second World War was called up into the French army. A year later, he was captured by the Germans. They never discovered that he was a Jew, so Tajfel survived the war in a series of Prisoner-of-war camps.

On his return home he discovered that none of his immediate family, and few of his friends, had survived the Nazi Holocaust. It has been speculated that this experience had a profound impact on Tajfel's later work on ingroups and outgroups, since Tajfel had managed to survive the Holocaust by pretending to be a member of another ethnic group.

After the war Tajfel worked first for international relief organizations including the United Nations' International Refugee Organization, to help rebuild the lives of orphans and concentration camp survivors. From 1946 he then began studying psychology, and by 1954 he had graduated in the UK with a first class psychology degree.

Afterwards he applied for British nationality with his wife and the two sons, which he was granted in 1957. His research work at the University of Oxford was on different areas of social psychology, including the social psychology of prejudice and nationalism. Following two research visits in the USA, in 1967 he was made Chair of Social Psychology at the University of Bristol, until his death from cancer in 1982.

Work in Social Psychology
Tajfel is perhaps best known for his minimal groups experiments. In these studies, test subjects were divided completely arbitrarily into two groups. Members of both groups began to identify themselves with their group, preferring other members of their group and behaving antagonistically to members of the other group.

From these experiments, Tajfel and John Turner developed their theory of social identity. They proposed that people have an inbuilt tendency to self-categorize themselves into one or more ingroups, building a part of their identity on the basis of membership of that group and enforcing boundaries with other groups.