Henri Tajfel summary

Learn about the life and work of Henri Tajfel, a Polish-born British social psychologist

Written and fact-checked by The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Below is the article summary. For the full article, see Henri Tajfel.

Henri Tajfel, (born June 22, 1919, Włocławek, Pol.—died May 3, 1982, Oxford, Eng.), Polish-born British social psychologist. Born into a Jewish family in Poland, he was a student at the Sorbonne in France when Germany invaded Poland in 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 war as a prisoner of war. All of his immediate family and most of his friends in Poland were killed in the Holocaust. After the war he spent six years helping to rehabilitate war victims and refugees and to repatriate or resettle them in other countries. Tajfel argued that North American social psychologists were mostly misguided in their pursuit of psychological laws that applied primarily to individuals rather than to groups. In contrast, Europe’s political history and wars demonstrated the need for theoretical constructs that reflect the social, political, and historical context within which social behaviour takes place.

social psychology Summary

Social psychology, the scientific study of the behaviour of individuals in their social and cultural setting. Although the term may be taken to include the social activity of laboratory animals or those in the wild, the emphasis here is on human social behaviour. Once a relatively speculative,

perception Summary

Perception, in humans, the process whereby sensory stimulation is translated into organized experience. That experience, or percept, is the joint product of the stimulation and of the process itself. Relations found between various types of stimulation (e.g., light waves and sound waves) and their

psychology Summary

Psychology, scientific discipline that studies mental states and processes and behaviour in humans and other animals. The discipline of psychology is broadly divisible into two parts: a large profession of practitioners and a smaller but growing science of mind, brain, and social behaviour. The two