How Social Identity Fuels Intergroup Discrimination

By Yasir Qadhi

This is an extract from the lecture: Why Muslims Divide – The psychology of why the people closest to you are the hardest to tolerate

Social Identity Theory was most famously promoted by a Polish intellectual by the name of Henry Tajfel. Henry Tajfel, [a Holocaust survivor] was a Polish prisoner of war, captured by the Nazis. He thought he would lose his life and then eventually he was freed. He went on to do phenomenal, groundbreaking research in groupthink, researching how people do this [holocaust] to other people.

World War II produced some amazing psychiatrists, sociologists and anthropologists who studied the banality of evil and how people can undertake such acts. Lots of books have been written about this. Henry Tajfel is one of these people that has gone through this reality as a young man. After he got out of the Nazi concentration camp, he went to London and became a well-known sociologist. He developed a theory that he called the theory of social identity.

His theory is very similar to Exaggerating Minor Differences to Maintain Group Identity, except he’s looking at it from a different angle i.e. sociology not psychology.

In a nutshell, what he says is that people have the innate tendency to categorize themselves as a certain subgroup. Once that subgroup is formed, it becomes a part of a person’s identity. It informs them of who they are and provides them with meaning, self-worth and self-esteem. Therefore, they have to protect anything that threatens their identity.

Once you identify with a group, your identity is shaped by a particular strand, and it becomes a core value. Your life now becomes contingent on defending the borders of that identity. Henry writes, that the mere act of categorization, once you have a category, a name, is sufficient to produce intergroup discrimination.

He has done multiple experiments on large groups of people where he basically divided people into imaginary categories, completely imaginary, completely random. Once they start identifying with a label that he has just invented at the beginning of the test, he observed that people in that one label started forming cliques against the other, started hating on the other, started preferring their own people simply because of an imaginary label. Groupthink became subconscious because it’s a part of their identity.

Hence within the same religion, boundaries have to be actively maintained or else your identity is threatened. As I said, if there was a Shia guy next to me, people they would lose their minds due to their identity. How dare you humanize the other, right? This is because the person that’s next to me, that particular case represents an actual threat to their identity.

The fact is that when you have an identity, automatically there’s a boundary that needs to be maintained. In order to maintain that boundary, the only way to do so is basically to reinforce what makes that identity, i.e. in this case [sunni & shia] it is sectarianism.

We make fun of gangs, but the fact of the matter is that at some level the psychological reality of belonging to a gang, we’re all guilty of it. It’s a psychological phenomenon. My group versus the other group at some level, even if it’s human, I and my family versus other people. That’s totally normal and natural, right? But Islamically, as Allah says, it doesn’t matter if your father, your mother does a crime, you cannot support them in that crime.

يَـٰٓأَيُّهَا ٱلَّذِينَ ءَامَنُوا۟ كُونُوا۟ قَوَّٰمِينَ بِٱلْقِسْطِ شُهَدَآءَ لِلَّهِ وَلَوْ عَلَىٰٓ أَنفُسِكُمْ أَوِ ٱلْوَٰلِدَيْنِ وَٱلْأَقْرَبِينَ

O believers! Stand firm for justice as witnesses for Allah even if it is against yourselves, your parents, or close relatives. (An-Nisa, 135)

Allah teaches us that truth rides above groupthink.

It’s easy to have groupthink. As I said, Henry Tajfel demonstrated that groupthink is so superficial that you can invent a label with a complete nonsensical distinction.

Look at the Rwandan genocide, the Hutus and the Tutsis, one of the worst genocides of our lifetimes took place in Rwanda, one of the most brutal genocides. When the Belgians colonized Rwanda, they needed to divide and conquer. They took the same group of people and they divided them into two different tribes, the Hutus and the Tutsis. They weren’t actual two different tribes. The Belgians invented these two tribes. There’s no DNA difference, language difference, cultural difference, there’s no religious difference. They are ethnically and culturally the exact same peoples. But when the colonizers came in the 19th century, they wanted to facilitate the divide and conquer, so they created an imaginary two tribes, the Hutus and the Tutsis. When they left, the doors of havoc and civil war were opened up. The situation, the volatile situation continued to exacerbate until the Hutus massacred the Tutsis. Millions of people were macheted to death over an imaginary term. Leon Mugesera described Tutsis as “cockroaches” and called for their extermination on radio and television. All for what? An imaginary label!

Reality demonstrates that groupthink is super dangerous and you just start imagining your identity linked to one group. Imagine if it’s not just a fake identity, that there’s actually markers of difference, different theologies. It becomes so much easier to have this simplistic groupthink. This is the theory of social identity.