• DOI:10.1038/scientificamerican1170-96
• Corpus ID: 29533997

Experiments in intergroup discrimination.

@article{Taijfel1970ExperimentsII,
  title={Experiments in intergroup discrimination.},
  author={H Taijfel},
  journal={Scientific American},
  year={1970},
  volume={223 5},
  pages={
          96-102
        }
}

• H. Taijfel
• Published 1970
• Psychology
• Scientific American

I ntergroup discrimination is a feature of most modern societies. The phe­ nomenon is depressingly similar re­ gardless of the constitution of the "in­ group" and of the "outgroup" that is per­ ceived as being somehow different. A Slovene friend of mine once described to me the stereotypes-the common traits attributed to a large human group-that are applied in his country, the richest constituent republic of Yugoslavia, to immigrant Bosnians, who come from a poorer region. Some time later I pre­ sented this description to a group of stu­ dents at the University of Oxford and asked them to guess by whom it was used and to whom it referred. The al­ most unanimous reply was that this was the characterization applied by native Englishmen to "colored" immigrants: people coming primarily from the West Indies, India and Pakistan. The intensity of discrimination varies more than the nature of the phenom­ enon. In countries with long-standing in­ tergroup problems-be they racial as in the U. S. , religious as in Northern Ireland or linguistic-national as in Belgium-ten­ sions reach the boiling point more easily than they do elsewhere. In spite of differ­ ing economic, cultural, historical, politi­ cal and psychological backgrounds, how­ ever, the attitudes of prejudice toward outgroups and the behavior of discrimi­ nation against outgroups clearly display a set of common characteristics. Social scientists have naturally been concerned to try to identify these characteristics in an effort to understand the origins of prejudice and discrimination.