Reading focus
Syllabus: How Do Other People and Social Situations Shape Us?
Use the reward matrices to distinguish a group's absolute benefit from its advantage over another group.
Why you’re reading it. Study unequal treatment without assuming that established hostility or direct personal gain must already be present.
A question to consider. Which allocation would show that a group values being ahead more than receiving the largest possible benefit?
Why this reading
Tajfel asks whether unequal allocations can appear when group divisions are slight and participants have no established conflict over resources. His reward matrices distinguish benefiting one's own group from maximizing its advantage over another.
Before you read
An ingroup is a group to which a participant belongs; an outgroup is a comparison group. Participants allocated rewards to other people, not themselves. Maximizing the difference between groups can reduce the amount one's own group receives.
Read for
- Identify which features of group membership the experiments remove and which the instructions still provide.
- Work through an allocation matrix to separate fairness, joint gain, ingroup gain, and relative advantage.
- Distinguish the observed allocation choices from the proposed explanation in terms of learned intergroup expectations.
Consider afterwards
- If two allocation options give your group different amounts and different leads over another group, which choices would distinguish concern for its welfare from concern for winning?
Editorial context
This is an accessible account of an early experimental program with British schoolboys. The task and instructions give even arbitrary groups social meaning. Deschrijver and Ramsey (2025) found unequal allocations based on similarity between individuals without explicit group assignment, questioning whether a group-specific process is necessary. Their results do not rule out additional effects of group identity. Neither research program establishes that hostility is inevitable or that real institutional inequality has the same cause. Categorization, evaluation, and unequal treatment need separate evidence.