Henri Tajfel

Henri Tajfel (1919-1981) was an influential social psychologist who explored the cognitive aspects of prejudice. He conducted experiments to demonstrate how categorization affected perceptual judgement and he conducted the original minimal group experiments showing how people would identify with artificial, meaningless groups. He formulated Social Identity Theory, which has had a major impact on contemporary social psychology and he was a key figure in establishing the European Association of Experimental Social Psychology.