Skip to content
AFTER CERTAINTY

Person

Henri Tajfel

Social psychologists who developed social identity theory and self-categorization—ingroup favoritism and boundary formation.

Why this matters

Tajfel and Turner explain how groups become moral communities—and why similarity is never enough for durable trust.

Focus in observatory

Works

article

The Social Identity Theory of Intergroup Behavior.

Tajfel, Henri, and John C. Turner. "The Social Identity Theory of Intergroup Behavior." In *Psychology of Intergroup Relations*, 1979.

Related concepts

Concept

Adaptation

Adaptation marks moral life responding to conditions that will not wait—scarcity, violence, scale, displacement. In Before Certainty Arrives, what begins as adaptation can outlive the pressures that first made it necessary. It helps preserve workable coordination under constraint, but can fail when adaptive tools are mistaken for permanent moral truth. It differs from inheritance because adaptation names responsive change; inheritance names what gets carried forward after conditions shift. It differs from drift because adaptation is active response; drift is gradual decoupling while machinery still runs.

Related books

Book

How Meaning Moves

Signal, Compression, Restraint, and the Pace of Understanding

Before people disagree, they interpret. How meaning forms through signal, compression, and restraint—long before anyone is obviously wrong, and often while the sentence is still forming.