When she was a staff writer at Breitbart News, Katie McHugh exchanged hundreds of emails with Stephen Miller, who is currently one of President Trump’s senior advisors. Then, McHugh was a champion of the alt-right and a supporter of white nationalist ideology. Now, she wants the world to know that those same ideas are what motivate Miller to craft hard-line anti-immigration policies. And she has the receipts to prove it.
Guest: Katie McHugh, former Breitbart staff writer
Podcast production by Mary Wilson, Jayson De Leon, Danielle Hewitt, and Mara Silvers.
Slate Plus members get bonus segments and ad-free podcast feeds. Sign up now.
Henri Tajfel’s early life – often awful in the living, exciting in the retelling – gave the pioneering social psychologist the fodder for his life’s defining work: understanding the roots of prejudice.
Born one hundred years ago into a Jewish family in the dawn of an independent Poland created from the detritus of three disintegrated empires, he left Poland to study chemistry in France in the late 1930s. When the Germans dismembered Poland, Tajfel joins a Polish unit in the French army, and is ultimately captured by the Germans. He survived the war as a POW, even as the Nazis exterminated most of his family.
“From that moment on,” his biographer Rupert Brown explains to Dave Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast, “one of his driving pre-occupations was to understand how could something like the Holocaust ever have happened.”
After the war, Tajfel worked in orphanages in France and Belgium and then in a displaced persons camp in Germany. At this time he met, and eventually married, a German Jewish woman who had emigrated to England before the war. This led him to move to Britain, where he studied and then taught psychology. His research at Oxford, and later and most notably at Bristol, focused on researching the cognitive roots of prejudice, discrimination and nationalism.
“[H]e made,” said Brown, “this really significant discovery that one doesn’t need very much to invoke inter-group discrimination and prejudice. Simply being told that you’re in one group or another seems to be enough to trigger that discrimination.”
Using a technique known as ‘minimal group experiments’ – creating kinship based on as little as what sort of abstract painting you like or what colour you prefer – Tajfel determined that “if you imposed categories on anything you are viewing or are living, people start exaggerating the differences between the two groups. He wondered, ‘Could we observe the same thing in a real behavioural situation?’”
Such questions conflicted with many of the then-prevailing notions of how prejudice arises, which Tajfel saw as too generic and too idiosyncratic. Based on the individual, they didn’t account for the clear historical precedent, Germany in the 1930s, that Tajfel saw firsthand (nor current examples like Islamophobia). Can that come down a particular personality or a particular level of frustration, Brown recounts Tajfel thinking. “He just thought that didn’t wash.”
As others have built on his insights, Tajfel’s own work now sounds much like conventional wisdom, even if Tajfel himself didn’t push into applications and left out issues like emotion and gender in his theorising. “In itself, social identity theory is rather an impoverished explanation for things like genocide, things like inter-group slaughter,” Brown says. “Because what does it say – ‘We want our group to be a little better than the other group,’ ‘we‘re looking for positive distinctiveness’? In trying to understand hatred, intergroup violence, we have to go beyond positive distinctiveness. There must be something else that drives people’s anger and hostility.”
Of late, Tajfel’s behaviour has overshadowed his contributions. He died in 1982, and in the 1960s and 1970s he was a serial sexual harasser of young women in his lab and elsewhere (and a difficult and demanding professor overall, as Brown, one of his former PhD students, confirmed). That legacy was known but ignored for years, and the European Association of Social Psychology instituted an important award for lifetime achievement in Tajfel’s name the year he died. This autumn, however, the Association rethought that decision; “naming an award after a person suggests that this individual is a role model as a scientist and beyond,” the organization stated as it announced renaming the award.
Brown does not shy away from the conduct in this podcast or in his new book, Henri Tajfel: Explorer of Identity and Difference. Nor does he defend it, although he does question the renaming: “The prize wasn’t given to recognise moral probity; it was given for contributions to the discipline.” (Brown’s research and his book were supported by a major research fellowship by The Leverhulme Trust and the European Association of Social Psychology itself.)
Clive Wynne, founding director of the Canine Science Collaboratory at Arizona State University, draws on studies from his lab and others around the world to explain what biology, neuroscience, and genetics reveal about dogs and love. His new book is called Dog Is Love: Why and How Your Dog Loves You. Follow host Maddie Sofia on Twitter @maddie_sofia. Email the show at shortwave@npr.org.
Mark Twain among the Indians and Other Indigenous Peoples (University of California Press, 2018; paperback edition, 2019) is the first book-length study of the writer’s evolving views regarding the aboriginal inhabitants of North America and the Southern Hemisphere, and his deeply conflicted representations of them in fiction, newspaper sketches, and speeches. Using a wide range of archival materials—including previously unexamined marginalia in books from Clemens’s personal library—Kerry Driscoll, Editor for the Mark Twain Papers and Project as well as former Professor of English at the University of Saint Joseph, charts the development of the writer’s ethnocentric attitudes about Indians and savagery in relation to the various geographic and social milieus of communities he inhabited at key periods in his life, from antebellum Hannibal, Missouri, and the Sierra Nevada mining camps of the 1860s to the progressive urban enclave of Hartford’s Nook Farm. The book also examines the impact of Clemens’s 1895–96 world lecture tour, when he traveled to Australia and New Zealand and learned firsthand about the dispossession and mistreatment of native peoples under British colonial rule. This groundbreaking work of cultural studies offers fresh readings of canonical texts such as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Roughing It, and Following the Equator, as well as a number of Twain’s shorter works.
Ryan Tripp is part-time and full-time adjunct history faculty for Los Medanos Community College as well as the College of Online and Continuing Education at Southern New Hampshire University.
The Supreme Court will hear a major gun rights case today, which could lead to the expansion of the Second Amendment. We discuss how we got here, and where we’re headed.
Impeachment moves to the House Judiciary Committee this week, marking the triumphant return of Jerry “Scary” Nadler. We review some greatest hits from the hearings so far, and the ways Republicans have tried to spin Trump’s dealings with Ukraine.
And in headlines: protests and resignations in Iraq, Sondland sexual misconduct allegations, and NBC blows it with Gabrielle Union.
Growing up in Tel Aviv, Israel, Omri Mor learned to appreciate music, art, food and other sensory experiences. After selling his first company, he and his now co-founder got together to catch up… over some pita and hummus. They began swapping stories of problems they encountered in processing payments to their third parties – so many problems that they were both required to build their own. After taking some time validate a solution in the market, Omri set out to build Routable – a modern bill payments, payouts and invoicing system, enabling companies to speed up payment processing through a secure platform.
Quick tip – Routable now supports SameDay Transfers!
For the past 16 years, Herbie Newell has been the President and Executive Director of Lifeline Children’s Services, an organization that serves vulnerable children around the world. Newell shares his views on the child welfare system, how his organization approaches finding homes for kids in need and how they train and equip parents who want to adopt.
Newell also discusses Lifeline’s international outreach (un)adopted, a program that helps children right in their home country. Through powerful stories of children they have worked with, Newell explains how they are equipping children for successful futures. Whether you are looking to adopt or not, learn how you can be a part of changing the lives of vulnerable children.
To learn more or be apart of their programs, go to Lifelinechild.org.
Also on today's show:
We read your letters to the editor. You can leave us a message at 202-608-6205 or write to us at letters@dailysignal.com.
And we share a good news story about an act of kindness at a diner that reveals how hard times can allow us to support and connect with others.
The Daily Signal podcast is available on Ricochet, Apple Podcasts, Google Play, or your favorite podcast app. All of our podcasts can be found at dailysignal.com/podcasts.
Data is a hugely profitable commodity - if you know how to process it. Tim Harford tells the story of Herman Hollerith, and how his 19th-century machine for processing census data laid the foundations for some of the world's most valuable companies.
