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Cognitive Aspects of Prejudice /. biosoc. Sci,, Suppl. 1 (1969), 173-191 COGNITIVE ASPECTS OF PREJUDICE HENRI TAJFEL Department of Psychology, University of Bristol Introduction The diffusion of public knowledge concerning laws which govern the physical, the biological and the social aspects of our world is neither peculiar to our times of mass communications nor to our own culture. These public images are as old as mankind, and they seem to have some fairly universal characteristics. The time of belief in a 'primitive mind' in other cultures has long been over in social anthro- pology. For example, at the turn of the century, Rivers (1905) could still write about differences in colour naming between the Todas and the Europeans in terms of the 'defective colour nomenclature of the lower races' (p. 392). Today, Claude Levi-Strauss (1966) bases much of his work on evidence showing the conceptual complexity of the understanding of the world in primitive cultures rooted in the 'science of the concrete' with its background of magic. As he wrote: To transform a weed into a cultivated plant, a wild beast into a domestic animal, to produce, in either of these, nutritious or technologically useful pro- cesses which were originally completely absent or could only be guessed at; to make stout water-tight pottery out of clay which is friable and unstable, liable to pulverise or crack; to work out techniques, often long and complex, which permit cultivation without soil or alternatively without water; to change toxic roots or seeds into foodstuffs or again to use their poison for hunting, war or ritual—there is no doubt that all these achievements required a genuinely scientific attitude, sustained and watchful interest, and a desire for knowledge for its own sake. For only a small proportion of observation and experiments (which must be assumed to have been primarily inspired by a desire for knowl- edge) could have yielded practical and immediately useful results (pp. 14-15). At the same time, the new anthropological disciplines of ethnobotany and ethnozoology are concerned with the study of biological classifications developed in primitive societies, and with the principles underlying these classifications. We are very far indeed from Rivers's 'defective nomenclatures'. An image of man emerges from these considerations, and from very many others. When we think of human attempts to understand the physical or the bio- logical environment, man appears essentially as an exploring and rational animal, 173 Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 69.235.193.204, on 03 Apr 2017 at 03:20:46, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021932000023336 174 Sociological aspects stumbling heavily on his way, pulled back by his insufficiencies and stupidities, but still imperfectly rational, still engaged in what Sir Frederick Bartlett (1932) called many years ago the 'effort after meaning'. This effort does not translate itself into some mystical concept of a 'group mind'. It works within the limits imposed by the capacities of individual human minds, and within the socially determined processes of the diffusion of knowledge. It is essentially a rational model, however imperfect the exploring rationality often appears to be. But there seems to be one exception to this model, one set of problems for the consideration of which we seem to have adopted a very different set of ideas. It is as if we were suddenly dealing with a different and strange animal that uses some of his abilities to adapt to some aspects of his environment, and is quite incapable of using them in order to adapt to others. The prevailing model of man as a creature trying to find his way in his social environment seems to have nothing in common with the ideas of exploration, of meaning, of understanding, of rational consistency. We have the rational model for natural phenomena; we seem to have nothing but a blood-and-guts model for social phenomena. In this new blood-and-guts romanticism so fashionable at present in some science and semi-science, man's attitudes and beliefs concerning the social environment are seen mainly as a by-product of tendencies that are buried deeply in his evolutionary past or just as deeply in his unconscious. This seems to be particularly true in a field in which the acquisition of knowledge about the springs of human behaviour is perhaps the most urgent and ominous task confronting us at present. This is the field of relations between large human groups which includes, of course, race relations and international relations. The psychological aspects of intergroup relations include the study of behaviour in intergroup situations, of behaviour related to these situations, and of beliefs and attitudes concerning an individual's own group and various other groups which are relevant to him. The competitive or co-operative, hostile or friendly, relations between groups are determined, to a very large extent, by the logic of the situations within which they arise. Once this is taken for granted it is equally true that these situations have their effects on the motives and attitudes of millions of individuals, that these motives and attitudes in turn determine behaviour, and that this behaviour partly determines in turn the subsequent relations between the groups. A psychological theory of intergroup relations must provide a two-way link between situations and behaviour, and it can do this through an analysis of the motivational and the cognitive structures which intervene between the two. But it is in this analysis that man's search to understand his environment often seems to be forgotten, and a peculiar one-way causation is established. In this, ideas and beliefs seem to be considered as no more than projections and rationalizations of powerful motivational forces, and somehow or other it has implicitly been taken for granted that inferences can be made directly from motivation and the evolu- tionary past of the species to complex intergroup behaviour without paying much attention to the flimsy cognitive by-products thrown out as if at random by the Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 69.235.193.204, on 03 Apr 2017 at 03:20:46, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021932000023336 Cognitive aspects of prejudice 175 subterranean springs of emotion and 'instinct'. Our image of a social man is that of a man who has lost his reason. Otherwise, the argument usually runs, how can we explain the perennial hostility of man to man ? Not much attention has been paid to the fact that co-operation between groups also needs to be explained; or that hostility need not be based on unconscious motivational factors, that it can also follow as a result of attempts to explain to oneself in the simplest and most convenient way the causal sequence of relations between groups. Two intellectual traditions form the background from which arises this denial of the autonomy of cognitive functioning. One consists of extrapolating from the background of animal behaviour to human behaviour in complex social situations; the other, of assuming that theories of unconscious motivation provide the neces- sary and sufficient basis for the understanding of social attitudes. There is no short- age in either of these trends of thought of carefully considered attempts to look in all directions before leaping. A recent paper by Tinbergen (1968) provides an excellent example of such methodological caution. But it is just as true that the general climate of opinion favours the blood-and-guts model which at present is having quite a run. It has been blessed and speeded on its way in the last few years by a number of books, some of which have quickly become best sellers. The act of blessing has been performed not only in the protected gentility of academic dis- cussions; it has burst through again and again to the public forum owing to serial- ization in newspapers, television appearances, and other public pronouncements. And thus, suddenly, tentative views concerning a complex problem about which we know very little have become public property and are already being used here and there to buttress and justify certain political opinions and actions. The relevance to this discussion of both the biological and the psycho-analytic points of view has been succinctly summarized by Lorenz (1964) in a recent symposium. He wrote: There cannot be any doubt, in the opinion of any biologically-minded scientist that intraspecific aggression is, in Man, just as much of a spontaneous instinc- tive drive as in most other higher vertebrates. The beginning synthesis between the findings of ethology and psycho-analysis does not leave any doubt either, that what Sigmund Freud has called the 'death drive' is nothing else but the mis- carrying of this instinct which, in itself, is as indispensable as any other (p. 49). I do not wish to quarrel on this occasion with all of this statement and to dis- cuss its several ambiguities. From the point of view of the present discussion, its major difficulty lies in the gaps which persist when the usual extrapolations are made to complex social behaviour in man. There is no doubt that under some conditions all men can and do display hostility towards groups other than their own, be they social, national, racial, religious, or any other. There is also no doubt, however, that under other conditions this hostility either does not appear or can be modified. The scientifically minded biologist (as distinct from Lorenz's biologically Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core.
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