Experiments in Intergroup Discrimination

Name: Under-estimators and over-estimators experiment conducted by Henri Tajfel (1970)

Aim: The aim of Tajfel's study was to demonstrate that categorization of people is sufficient for people to discriminate in favor of their own group and against people of the other group.

Participants: The participants were 64 boys of ages 14 and 15 from a school in a suburb of Bristol.T

Procedure: The participants were divided into 8 group. All of the boys in each group knew each other. The boys then were told to go together to the lecture room. In the lecture room the researcher told them that the experiment was interested in the study of visual judgments. Then forty clusters of varying numbers of dots were flashed on the screen. The boys were asked to record each of them. In this experiment were two conditions and the researchers made sure 4 groups of 8 served are in each condition. After they finished the test the boys who were in 1. condition groups were told that some people constantly overestimated the number of dots and some consistently underestimate the number of dots. In the 2. condition groups the boys were told that some of them were always more accurate than the others. After the judgments had been made the boys were told they were going to be divided into new groups according to the visual judgments they had just made. The truth is that the participants were randomly assigned to the groups. Then the researchers gave the participants another task. They were given a booklet of matrices and were told to give other students/participants rewards and penalties in real money. The boys did not know the identities of people who they were giving rewards and penalties. The boys were asked to three types of choice:

1. in-group choices: both top and bottom row referred to members of the same groups as the boy.
2. out-group choices: both top and bottom row referred to members of the different group from the boy.
3. inter-group choices: one row referred to the boys' own group and the other one to the other group.

Results: The researchers found out that in in-group and out-group choices participants gave the same amount of money to all members. However, in inter-group choices most of the participants gave more money to  members of their own group than to  members of other groups.

Conclusion: The experiment conducted by Tajfel demonstrates that inter-group discrimination is quite easy to trigger off. It also shows that categorization of people into groups leads to conflict.

Strengths: Tajfel made sure that he had the high-level of control on the procedure (for example when students were awarding points to other students they did not know their names).

Limitations: One of the limitations was that the experiment wasn't done naturally but in the laboratory. Tajfel's experiment was criticized for being ecologically invalid.

Cultural Differences: None