"Henri Tajfel's interest in identity and group prejudice was sparked by his own experiences as a Polish Jew during the Second World War. As Professor of Social Psychology at Bristol university he developed a series of experiments known as the Minimal Group Studies, the purpose of which was to establish the minimum basis on which people could be made to identify with their own group and show bias against another.
Claudia Hammond re-visits the Minimal Group Studies of 1971, where Tajfel and his collaborators got boys at a comprehensive school to view abstract paintings and then assigned them to the 'Klee' group or the 'Kandinsky' group, apparently because of the preferences they declared, but in fact entirely at random. Even though the boys didn't know who else was allocated to their group, they consistently awarded more points to their own group than to the other. So even though who belonged to which group was meaningless, they always tended to favour their own.
This proved to be the first step towards Social Identity Theory, as developed by Henri Tajfel and John Turner, which stressed that our identification with groups varies according to how significant that group is at the time: if we're at war our national identity is important, at a football match it's our team identity that's to the fore...
Tajfel died in 1982, but his legacy can be seen in the work many of his former students continue in the same field. Claudia Hammond hears from four of them, including Michael Billig - Professor of Social Sciences at Loughborough University, who helped run the 1971 studies, Miles Hewstone, Rupert Brown and Steve Reicher, Professors of Social Psychology at Oxford, Sussex and St Andrews respectively."
"A technology that monitors electrical activity in the brain could help identify infants who will go on to develop autism, scientists say.
The technology, known as electroencephalography, or EEG, is also providing hints about precisely how autism affects the brain and which therapies are likely to help children with autism spectrum disorders.
"Right now, the earliest we can reliably identify a child is, say, three years of age," says Charles Nelson, a professor of pediatrics and neuroscience at Children's Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School. "Our work is designed to see [if we] can we do that in early infancy, long before any signs or symptoms of autism are apparent in the child's behavior."
If EEG lives up to its early promise, Nelson says, children with autism might start getting therapy before their first birthday.
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We humans are such complex beasts. Why is it that we can be so wonderful and yet so awful, eccentric and prosaic, enigmatic and obvious, witty and dull, and all of these at once?
All in the Mind, presented by Natasha Mitchell, is Radio National's weekly foray into all things mental - a program about the mind, brain and behaviour. From dreaming to depression, addiction to artificial intelligence, consciousness to coma, psychoanalysis to psychopathy, free will to forgetting - All in the Mind explores the human condition through the mind's eye.
Our mental machinery remains one of the greatest mysteries of this or any other age, performing for us the most incredible feats of perception, cognition and coordination. Scientists, theologians, philosophers and armchair psychologists alike have long debated its form and function. And yet, the mind, in all its madness and brilliance, continues to elude us.
All in the Mind brings together unexpected voices, themes and ideas and engages with both leading thinkers and personal stories. Psychology and human behaviour are only part of the equation. The program's scope is considerably broader and explores themes in science, religion, health, philosophy, education, history and pop culture, with the mind as the key focus.