# Groupism

Intergroup Conflicts Can Arise Quickly:
The Minimal Group Paradigm
Research on social identity theory has found that once people are di-
vided into groups—even randomly divided by the toss of a coin—they
start to show remarkable favoritism to their own group members. In
a classic study, Henri Tajfel (1970) researched how schoolboys would
divide rewards among others. First, boys were divided into groups by
guessing how many dots ashed on a screen. Once they all guessed,
the researchers told each boy whether he overestimated or underes-
timated the number of dots and assigned him to one of the groups
on the basis of his guess. In reality, though, the boys were randomly
assigned to one group or another; their guesses were not used to
create the groups. One might think that the reason for creating the
groups would have little impact on how the boys subsequently treat-
ed one another, but surprisingly, it actually had a very clear impact
on their behavior. Even though their assignment to groups was based
on a seemingly trivial issue—whether they overestimated or under-
estimated the number of dots on the screen—once separated into
groups, the boys tended to favor other members of their own group.
That is, when allocating rewards between the two groups, overes-
timators favored other overestimators, and underestimators favored
other underestimators, even when the boys who were making deci-
sions knew nothing else about the others in their groups.
Social psychologists use techniques like this one to help isolate
and identify why groups have such a powerful inuence. By ran-
domly assigning people to arbitrary groups, researchers can examine
the effects of simply being a part of the group, independent of other
qualities, characteristics, or experiences group members may have in
common. This technique is called the minimal group paradigm, be-
cause the groups are formed on a minimal or trivial basis. Tajfel’s idea
for studying minimal groups likely resulted from his own experienc-
es as a soldier during World War II. During the war, he was struck by
how important group identity was. Tajfel was ghting for the French
army when he was captured by the Germans. While a prisoner of
war, Tajfel hid his group identity as a Jew. Because his captors never
knew he was Jewish, he survived the war. When he returned home he
discovered that his family and friends were killed for no other reason
than their social identities—as members of the group “Jews.” Perhaps
because he saw people being brutalized for their group memberships
during World War II, Tajfel wanted to investigate the minimal condi-
tions necessary for people to discriminate against each other. Through
a series of clever experiments such as the one described above, Tajfel
discovered that simply being placed in laboratory-contrived groups
was enough to cause strangers, as well as children who used to be
friends, to discriminate against each other.
Of course, intergroup tensions are only increased when group
members utilize stereotypes. Stereotypes are overgeneralizations, or
beliefs that every member of a group shares similar characteristics.
For example, to describe someone as a professor conjures up certain
assumptions about that person. We may assume, without knowing
anything at all about the person, that the person is intelligent, intro-
spective, and probably not very athletic. We might also assume that
person to be male. Sometimes, those expectations may be correct.
However, more often than not, stereotypic overgeneralizations lead
us to incorrect conclusions about people based on their group mem-
berships. Stereotypes act as a lter or screen, biasing the informa-
tion we notice and distorting our interpretation of another’s behavior
(Darley & Gross; Dunning & Sherman; Stone, Perry, & Darley).

Intergroup Contact: A Solution?
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			An Exerpts from Psychology of Harry Potter
			by Neil Mulholland