Henri Tajfel

In 2019, evidence emerged documenting that Tajfel displayed inappropriate conduct toward female members of his lab. Tajfel regularly directed unwanted sexual attention to female colleagues. In his own research, he was uninterested in applying social identity theory to gender. As a consequence, the prestigious Tajfel Award will be renamed by the European Society for Social Psychology.

The implications of this position were profound. It meant that some of the basic psychological roots of prejudice lay not in particular personality types, but in general, "ordinary" processes of thinking, especially processes of categorising. Tajfel outlined these ideas in his article, "Cognitive Aspects of Prejudice", which was first published in 1969 and has been republished subsequently. For this article, Tajfel was awarded the first annual Gordon Allport Intergroup Relations Prize by the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues.

In 1967 he was made Chair of Social Psychology at the University of Bristol. At Bristol he conducted research into intergroup relations and was active in making Bristol University a European centre for social psychology. He retired from Bristol and moved back to Oxford shortly before his death from cancer in 1982.

In 1951 Tajfel began studying psychology at Birkbeck College, University of London. He won a competitive scholarship for mature students with an essay on the subject of prejudice. In 1954 he graduated and worked as a lecturer, first at the University of Durham and then at Oxford. In 1962 he was made a Founding Fellow of Linacre College, Oxford. In his research work at the University of Oxford, Tajfel examined several different areas of social psychology, including social judgement, nationalism, and, most importantly, the cognitive aspects of prejudice.

He was granted French citizenship in 1946. However, he was soon to meet his future wife Anna-Sophie Eber (Ann), who had been born in Germany but had moved to Britain before the Second World War. Henri and Ann set up home in Britain where their two sons, Michael and Paul, were born. Henri took on British citizenship (for details, see the biography in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography).

Henri Tajfel (born Hersz Mordche; 22 June 1919 – 3 May 1982) was a Polish social psychologist, best known for his pioneering work on the cognitive aspects of prejudice and social identity theory, as well as being one of the founders of the European Association of Experimental Social Psychology.