Turner 
John Turner
Influences on
Inter-group behaviour
Inter-group behaviour. This refers to how two or more groups behave in interaction with each other. Like intra-group behaviour, it has been studied from a range of perspectives. The broader term of inter-group relations is also part of the study of social identity.
Bristol
Bristol. Very frequently in scientific work a particular department, centre or place becomes pivotal –associated with an important transition in thinking or with exciting new developments and breakthroughs. Such prominence can be quite transient, sometimes lasting for only for a few years, dependent on a particular combination of people and the Zeitgeist. The people and the Zeitgeist move on but nostalgia remains about these high points and heydays. In European social psychology and particularly British social psychology, Bristol University and the social psychological research conducted in the Psychology Department at Bristol in the 1970s and early 1980s has this reputation. These were the years in which Henri Tajfel was the Professor of Social Psychology. During these years a genuinely different European social psychology emerged first as a manifesto worked out in the early 1970s by a group of scholars across Europe with Moscovici in Paris and Tajfel in Bristol as prime movers. European social psychology was to be a more politically engaged and critical discipline and these ideals were realised in the stream of research from Bristol in the 1970s and 1980s on social identity theory and the study of intergroup relations and group process. Social identity theory remains one of the core theoretical frameworks of social psychology and still inspires a great deal of research today. Tajfel was a larger than life character and one of the most important intellectuals in the history of social psychology. He was someone with the energy and passion (and connections across Europe and in the USA) needed to gather together a highly productive group of students, research fellows and co-workers and inspire them to be creative. Everyone who was anyone in social psychology seemed to pass through Bristol in those years. Tajfel entertained a constant stream of eminent visitors from the States and elsewhere and as a PhD student at Bristol in the late 70s, my no doubt rather rosy memory is of large informal dinners at Tajfel's house which turned into impromptu seminars, with Tajfel presiding, goading and challenging and enjoying the cut and thrust as he turned over idea after idea for critical examination. The Bristol research group was not an easy environment, particularly for women, yet many of the current generation of British social psychologists were educated there and owe it an enormous debt. It created an academic network that persisted after Tajfel died in 1981 and the group dispersed. Tajfel included among the first generation of his students, for instance, Michael Billig, John Turner, Howard Giles, Rupert Brown, Richard Eiser, Colin Fraser and Glynis Breakwell and these academics in turn educated the next generation of social psychology researchers. In this way the memory of a place and the conditions which created an intellectual framework carried on. Written by: Margaret Wetherell
Stereotyping
Stereotyping involves making relatively rigid perceptions about some particular social grouping and is a result of the operation of schemas. The generalizations made will tend to be overly simplistic, ignoring the actual complexities involved, leading to a mental representation of a person as more like a typical member of a social category than the person actually is- an inevitable consequence of the cognitive process of overgeneralization. In principle, stereotypes can be both negative or positive. However, when negative, stereotyping can be seen as one of the mechanisms underlying PREJUDICE.
Social Influence
Social influence is the process through which people or groups influence other individuals or groups. These influences can affect attitudes, beliefs, values, or behaviour, and can be passed on through personal contact or via the media and other social institutions.
My views developed at a rapid pace, way beyond anything that would have been possible without the ed ucational and social opportunities of university and the clever, experienced, sincere people I met there.
I argued that as people defined themselves more in terms of a social than personal identity there wa s a depersonalization of the self which produced emergent and distinctive group processes. From 1978 to 1981 I ran a research project on these ideas and worked with my PhD students to examine different aspects of the analysis (Mike Hogg, Penny Oakes, Steve Reicher, Margaret Wetherell).
I was born in London in 1947. I came from a manual working-class background in South London and was a product of the post-war Welfare State and State education system in the UK. It was the political changes which occurred in Britain after the war which made it possible for me to attend a state grammar school and then (a new) university (Sussex).
Tajfel had just published the results of his studies on the “minimal group paradigm”. My PhD provi ded a “social identity” interpretation of the results. From the moment I wrote my first review in late 1971 (published in 1975) Tajfel and I began an intellectual collaboration which eventually produced “social identity theory” (more or less “finalized” in 1976, when we wrote a chapter published in 1979).
He saw it as an important step forward and was gratified that the concept of social identity looked to have even more to contribute than he had ever imagined. People looking backwards now assume incorrectly that the personal-social identity distinction was part of social identity theory – a tribute I suppose to the centrality of the idea.
My work is still influenced at a metatheoretical level by my political views (as are everybody else' s no matter what they say) and strongly shaped by my distaste for so-called scientific theory which is nothing more than propaganda for individualistic, asocial and reductionist assertions about the nature of the human mind which have no serious basis in empirical evidence. Substantively I have been keen to demonstrate and argue for the validity, richness, sophistication and adaptiveness of the group dimension of the human self.
I am the first (and may still be the last) person in my large immediate and extended family who has ever done either to my knowledge. Naturally this background shaped my political and social attitudes and still does. It also shapes a lot of my thinking about psychology.
After Princeton I went in late 1983 to Australia. I worked at Macquarie University in Sydney until 1990, when I accepted the Chair of Psychology at the Australian National University in Canberra.
In 1982/3 I spent a year at the Institute For Advanced Study, Princeton, where after pondering hard the various conceptual and empirical issues I worked out a more satisfying statement of what I then christened “self-categorization theory” (published in 1985).
From 1974 to 1977 Tajfel, Howard Giles and I (and others including Richard Bourhis and Rupert Brown ) worked on the first big research project on social identity and intergroup relations.
At ANU I was Head of Department for several years and Dean of Science for a couple – an interesting and enjoyable experience, for the people one met and what one could do, not for its helpfulness to research.
I went to the University of Sussex in 1965 and became completely immersed in the changes taking place in people's attitudes and thinking. Soon there was student revolt and student revolutionary politics around the world, attempted anti-trade union legislation in Britain, the Vietnam War, the expansion and cheapening of British higher education, and of course the hippies, psychodelia, the druggies, all the fun of the new pop sensibilities. I enjoyed the fun and worked hard at politics.
In 1978 I wrote a paper (published in 1981 & 82) on what became “self-categorization theory”. I had always been interested in the question of why people in the minimal group paradigm seemed to act as a psychological group. I realized in 1978 that it was possible to explain group behaviour simply as people acting in terms of a shared social identity.
Tajfel never saw the formal statement of self-categorization theory (he died in 1982), but he knew m y earlier work on the “cognitive redefinition of the social group” and liked it.
My undergraduate career was idiosyncratic but eventually in 1971 I obtained a degree in social psychology – thanks in large part to the generous help of Marie Jahoda, Neil Warren and other academics in the department. I then went to the University of Bristol to do a PhD supervised by Henri Tajfel. I worked closely with Tajfel for the next decade, as PhD student, research associate and lecturer.
During all this time I carried on (with others) working on self-categorization theory, in relation t o social influence, group polarization, stereotyping, the self-concept, and prejudice, which I am still doing.
Author: John Turner
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