The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure

by Greg Lukianoff

Profoundly affected by his experiences as a Jew during that period in Europe, including having his entire family in Poland murdered by the Nazis, Tajfel wanted to understand the conditions under which people would discriminate against members of an outgroup. So in the 1960s he conducted a series of experiments, each of which began by dividing people into two groups based on trivial and arbitrary criteria, such as flipping a coin. For example, in one study, each person first estimated the number of dots on a page. Irrespective of their estimations, half were told that they had overestimated the number of dots and were put into a group of “overestimators.” The other half were sent to the “underestimators” group. Next, subjects were asked to distribute points or money to all the other subjects, who were identified only by their group membership. Tajfel found that no matter how trivial or “minimal” he made the distinctions between the groups, people tended to distribute whatever was offered in favor of their in-group members.