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Concept
Intergroup relations
Summary
Intergroup relations refers to interactions between individuals in different social groups, and to interactions taking place between the groups themselves collectively. It has long been a subject of research in social psychology, political psychology, and organizational behavior.
In 1966, Muzafer Sherif proposed a now-widely recognized definition of intergroup relations:
Whenever individuals belonging to one group interact, collectively or individually, with another group or its members in terms of their group identification, we have an instance of intergroup behavior.
Research on intergroup relations involves the study of many psychological phenomena related to intergroup processes including social identity, prejudice, group dynamics, and conformity among many others. Research in this area has been shaped by many notable figures and continues to provide empirical insights into modern social issues such as social inequality and discrimination.
While philosophers and thinkers have written about topics related to intergroup relations dating back to Aristotle's Politics, the psychological study of group attitudes and behavior began in the late 19th century. One of the earliest scientific publications on group processes is The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, written in 1895 by French doctor and scientist Gustave Le Bon. Le Bon proposed that a group of individuals is different from the sum of its parts (often paraphrased as "a group is more than the sum of its parts"). This fundamental idea of crowd psychology states that when individuals form a group, this group behaves differently than each individual would normally act. Le Bon theorized that when individuals formed a group or crowd, there would emerge a new psychological construct which would be shaped by the group's "racial [collective] unconscious." Le Bon put forth three phenomena that explained crowd behavior: submergence (or anonymity), when individuals lose their sense of self and responsibility by joining a crowd, contagion, the tendency for individuals in a crowd to follow the beliefs and behaviors of the crowd, and suggestion, which refers to how the beliefs and behaviors of the crowd are shaped by a shared racial unconscious.
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