Emeritus Professor Rupert Brown

This open lecture will take place in Lecture Hall 16, Albano.

Language: English

Organizer of this seminar is the Division of personality-, social- and developmental psychology.

Contact: Sabina Čehajić-Clancy

Presentation

Rupert Brown is Emeritus Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Sussex and one of the most esteemed social psychologists in the field of intergroup relations. Throughout his outstanding career, he maintained an interest in how to improve intergroup relations, understand and reduce prejudice, later focussing on hate crime and refugee resettlement. He is the author of Group Processes (3e, Wiley, 2019), Prejudice (2e, Wiley, 2010), Henri Tajfel: explorer of identity and difference (Routledge, 2019) and over 180 scientific articles and book chapters.

Abstract

In this talk I want to trace the personal and professional life of Henri Tajfel, probably one of Europe’s most influential social psychologists of the 20th century. Born in Poland to a prosperous Jewish family, Tajfel emigrated to France in the 1930s to study at university. With the outbreak of World War II, he was captured by the Germans and spent the war in a prisoner-of-war camp, managing to keep his Jewish identity hidden. After the war, he returned to France to discover that the rest of his family had perished in the Holocaust. For six years, he worked in Jewish orphanages in France and Belgium and then in a displaced persons camp in Germany. He emigrated to Britain in the early 1950s and began his academic career (at the age of 32).

His thinking was much influenced by Jerome Bruner, the author of the New Look cognitive revolution of the 1950s. He and Bruner became close friends, and I will devote part of my talk to an examination of their professional and personal relationship. From the more ‘cognitive’ focus of his early work on categorisation and human judgement, Tajfel’s research evolved into a more full-fledged social psychology of intergroup relations.

He helped to develop the minimal intergroup paradigm which produced the discovery that mere categorisation is sufficient to elicit intergroup discrimination. This laid the ground for his famous Social Identity Theory of intergroup behaviour. I will critically appraise that theory, arguing that, while many of its original claims as a theory of prejudice may not be sustainable, it is undeniable that it is now one of the most important perspectives in social psychology.

I will conclude my talk by discussing some more personal aspects of his life, including the importance of his Jewish identity and also his (deserved) reputation as a serial harasser of women.

About the General seminars in psychology

This series of seminars is a collaboration between the six research divisions at the Department of Psychology. Local, national and international researchers are invited to speak of current research subjects.

The seminars are held on Wednesdays at 14:00–15:00 onsite in Albano and/or online in Zoom. Extra seminars can also be held on other weekdays or hours, among these the so called half-time seminars in the Doctoral Program in Psychology.