The Social Dimension: Volume 1: European Developments in Social Psychology

European Studies in Social Psychology

by Henri Tajfel (Editor)

The two volumes of The Social Dimension present a comprehensive survey of the major developments in social psychology which took place in Europe during the very active 1970s and 1980s. They aim to capture the diversity and vitality of the discipline, stress the growing emphasis on fully social analyses of social psychological phenomena - hence 'the social dimension' - and to provide a valuable resource for researchers in the future. Although comprehensive in scope, the volumes are not written in the formal style of a reference handbook. Instead, the authors of the thirty-three chapters, drawn from more than a dozen mainly European countries and all experts in their own fields, were invited to present their own personal overviews of the issues in social psychology on which they were actively working. Both volumes are organized into three main Parts. Volume 1 is concerned with the social development of the child, interpersonal communication and relationships, and the social reality, group processes, and intergroup relations. This ambitious enterprise has produced a distinctive yet authoritative summary and evaluation of the growth points of social psychology in Europe which will interest and influence not only social psychologists but many readers from related disciplines.

396 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1984

About the author

From Wikipedia:

Henri Tajfel (formerly Hersz Mordche) (June 22, 1919 Włocławek, Poland – May 3, 1982 in Bristol, UK) was a British social psychologist, best known as the principal co-developer of Social Identity Theory.

Biography

Henri Tajfel was the son of a Polish Jewish businessman. He began his career by studying chemistry at the Sorbonne, but at the outbreak of the Second World War was called up into the French army. A year later, he was captured by the Germans. They never discovered that he was a Jew, so Tajfel survived the war in a series of Prisoner-of-war camps.

On his return home he discovered that none of his immediate family, and few of his friends, had survived the Nazi Holocaust. It has been speculated that this experience had a profound impact on Tajfel's later work on ingroups and outgroups, since Tajfel had managed to survive the Holocaust by pretending to be a member of another ethnic group.

After the war Tajfel worked first for international relief organizations including the United Nations' International Refugee Organization, to help rebuild the lives of orphans and concentration camp survivors. From 1946 he then began studying psychology, and by 1954 he had graduated in the UK with a degree in psychology.

Afterwards he applied for British nationality with his wife and their two sons, which he was granted in 1957. His research work at the University of Oxford was on different areas of social psychology, including the social psychology of prejudice and nationalism. Following two research visits in the USA, in 1967 he was made Chair of Social Psychology at the University of Bristol, until his death from cancer in 1982.