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Man’s human instinct to belong to a group and urge to feel superior to others is manifest in a number of studies I found on the Internet … it’s always used by dictators and fascist regimes like Hitler and the Nazi’s. Exploit human nature for political gain.
Henri Tajfel and his minimal groups experiments
Henri Tajfel is perhaps best known for his minimal groups experiments. In these studies, test subjects were divided arbitrarily into two groups, based on a trivial and almost completely irrelevant basis. Participants did not know other members of the group, did not even know who they were, and had no reason to expect that they would interact with them in the future. Still, members of both groups began to identify themselves with their group, preferring other members of their group and favoring them with rewards that maximized their own group’s outcomes.
Subsequently, Tajfel and his student John Turner developed the theory of social identity. They proposed that people have an inbuilt tendency to categorize themselves into one or more ingroups, building a part of their identity on the basis of membership of that group and enforcing boundaries with other groups.
Social identity theory suggests that people identify with groups in such a way as to maximize positive distinctiveness; groups offer both identity (they tell us who we are) and self-esteem (they make us feel good about ourselves). The theory of social identity has had a very substantial impact on many areas of social psychology, including group dynamics, intergroup relations, prejudice and stereotyping, and organizational psychology.
The papers of Henri Tajfel (1919-1982), the Bristol University Professor of Social Psychology
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."
