“I’m glad I’m in the group that’s not full of assholes.”

– Everyone in Group A, but also everyone in Group B

 

I’m sure I’ll get a number of psych students lecturing me on how incomplete my summary of Social Identity Theory is (or rather, how it’s completely wrong) but c’mon guys, I skimmed a Wikipedia article and wanted to make a comic about it, cut me some slack. Anyway, this comic is more specifically about Henri Tajfel’s “minimal group” experiments, where he tried to determine the the minimal criteria required for a group of people to create a group identity for themselves, and thus, have a basis to begin examining the roots of such things as prejudice and discrimination. Turns out, group identity was created as soon as he randomly assigned the people to groups. A whole bunch of other interesting experiments and ideas came from there, but I’m sure you guys can follow your own Wiki trail.

– James