Tajfel, Henri (19191982)

Tajfel's Personal and Intellectual History

Born into a Jewish family in Poland, Henri Tajfel was a student at the Sorbonne in France when Germany invaded Poland in September 1939. A fluent French speaker, he served in the French army, was captured by the invading German forces in 1940, and spent the rest of the conflict as a prisoner of war. His survival depended on his assuming a French identity and concealing his PolishJewish heritage. Years later, he had difficulty understanding the Polish language on a return visit to his native country, a reminder that he had come to think and speak as a Frenchman.

The war's end revealed that all his family and most of his friends had been killed. While still in France, he spent his time for several years helping European refugees to rehabilitate and be repatriated or else resettled in other countries. These events left profound psychological marks on Tajfel and provided him with important intellectual signposts for his later research and writing dealing with discrimination against minorities and how identity is shaped by ethnic and national group membership. In his own wartime experience, he observed that had his Polish-Jewish identity been revealed, his fate would have been determined by his social categorya certain death, no matter what other personal qualities his might have had.

He married and with his wife, Anne, moved to England in 1951. As an undergraduate student at Birkbeck College, London, he won a scholarship for an essay on a topic close to his heart, prejudice. He graduated in 1954, worked as a research assistant at the University of Durham, and later became a lecturer in social psychology at Oxford. In 1967, he was appointed to a chair in social psychology at Bristol University, a post that he held until his death.

Tajfel's Research Contributions

Tajfel's earliest published research was on social perception, based on what was termed the New Look in perception and stimulated by Jerome Bruner at Harvard University. What was new was an emphasis on perception as an active rather than a reactive process. People's mental processes often organize everyday stimuli according to [Page 898]those values or need states that are current or salient at that moment. For example, a meat eater who was very hungry might mistake a blurred photographic image of a red flower for a juicy steak.