The Long Way Back to Ourselves

4.1

Us and Them: The Psychology of the Group

This episode examines why humans sort each other into in-groups and out-groups so easily, using Henri Tajfel's 1970s Bristol experiments in which boys given an arbitrary label favored strangers who shared it, even sacrificing their own group's payoff to widen the gap. It revisits the Robbers Cave summer camp study, showing through journalist Gina Perry's work that an earlier, unpublished run produced the opposite result, undermining its textbook status. You learn what gets measured is mostly favoritism toward one's own group rather than hostility toward others, a distinction psychologist Marilynn Brewer insisted on. It also tests Gordon Allport's contact hypothesis against a 2006 analysis by Pettigrew and Tropp, holding up only under conditions like shared goals and equal status.