Social Conflict Theory

Prejudice is the unwarranted or wrong attitude (positive or negative) towards a person based exclusively on the individual’s membership of a social group. (McLeod, S.A) Prejudice people may not act on their attitude, meaning they can be prejudice towards someone but not discriminate against them. Prejudice contains three components of attitude i.e. cognitive, this is what we know about the object of our prejudice, affective, which is what our attitude and feelings are for an individual or group, behavioral, this is the behavior we exhibit towards a certain group or individual. In psychology prejudice is a clear example of social cognition.

Social comparison which is defining groups in comparison to other groups and the third process is self-esteem, being part of a group gives us an overall sense of self-worth and personal belief in ourselves. There is relevant research to back up the social conflict theory. Henry Tajfel developed this theory, he was a psychiatrist by Jewish origin, who fled to the US from a Nazi-Occupied Europe. In Tajfels theory he says we raise our self-esteem through group membership and group bias. The research consisted of a minimal group experiment. Tajfel’s aim was to demonstrate that by simply putting people into groups (categorisation) it is enough for people to discriminate in favour of their (in)group and against members of the other (out)group. In his experiment, he used 48 boys as subjects. The boys were shown paintings and were asked to express their favourite and put into according groups based on their choice. They were then asked to complete tasks which involved allocating points to members of their group and the other group. They were told the points would give them money at the end of the study. The boys could give both groups the same amount of money (meaning both teams would be better off) or they could choose to give more to their group and less to the other (meaning both would be worse off). The boys chose to make their group better off at the expense of the other, even though this meant they would end up with less money. The experiments carried out by Tajfel clearly demonstrate that inter-group discrimination is easy to trigger off. Tajfel demonstrates that the categorisation into groups is enough to produce conflict and discrimination. In making their group choices they gave more money to members of their own