ABSTRACT
In the 1960s, Henri Tajfel and his colleagues were investigating how intergroup bias emerges from aspects of the intergroup context such as competition for resources, status differentials, and negative stereotypes. Recognizing that many of these variables tend to co-occur in real intergroup situations, they created a minimal version of an intergroup context involving two groups without any interaction with ingroup or outgroup members, or any of the other aspects typically associated with intergroup conflict. They assigned participants to these so-called “minimal” groups on the basis of arbitrary and rather meaningless criteria, including their ability to estimate the number of dots on a screen or preferences for abstract artwork. Participants were then asked to allocate resources between the members of their ingroup and the outgroup. Importantly, the researchers ensured that there was no competition for resources and that participants’ decisions had no direct bearing on their own individual outcomes (see Billig, 1976 for a review).
