George Monbiot (Rightwing populists will keep winning until we grasp this truth about human nature, 13 April) makes some very important points about the psychology of those who follow demagogues and rightwing populist leaders. But this knowledge is not new. After the horrors of the rise of the Nazis and the persecution by them of Jews and other minority groups before and during the second world war, psychologists, many of them Jewish, began to systematically study the origins of such hatred. One was Henri Tajfel, a Jew born in Poland whose family were murdered by the Nazis.
Tajfel was primarily interested in group identity, and popularised the terms in-group and out-group. Most importantly for understanding our times, Tajfel’s work helped to show that not only do we work for, and experience reward through, the in-group’s success (familiar to supporters of any football club), but, more sinisterly, we will work for, and experience reward through, the detriment of the out-group, even if that also means the in-group suffers, so long as it is to a lesser extent.
