I changed the stress, stress changed me, you can not separate the stress form life and you can not separate the stress from me, because stress became life and by that stress is influenced all life


Europe’s Journal of Psychology, 7(2), pp. 204-217 

www.ejop.org 

 

 

 

Psychology, domination and resistance 

 

 

By Stephen Reicher 

University of St. Andrews 

 

 

Two sides of the human condition 

 

In my first year as an undergraduate two things drew me into psychology and made 

me passionate about the subject. Now, over 35 years later, they make me 

passionate still. 

 

The first experience was hearing Henri Tajfel lecture. In these days of assessments and 

league tables we often measure a teacher by what is easiest to measure: the 

provision of good lecture handouts, clear course objectives and aims, clear 

feedback and so on. What Henri had was the capacity to inspire, the ability to make 

you care about the questions and therefore motivate you to find out the answers. 

The questions he asked — about group bias, about intergroup hatred, and above 

all, how can we explain (and perhaps help contain) real life atrocities — derived 

from his own past as a Polish Jew in the Second World War. And they touched on my 

past, for my family too are Jewish and my father came from Poland. 

 

The second experience may seem mundane, even trivial, by comparison. But it 

marked me just as deeply. At about the same time as I was learning about group 

processes, the Student‘s Union voted to occupy the University administration 

buildings in support of a demand for nursery provision. Coming from a nice polite 

middle-class background I wasn‘t sure about occupations and I was a little scared 

of getting mixed up with those extremists so castigated in the media and whom my 

parents had warned me about. I was also afraid of how the University might respond 

(and indeed the University did try, unsuccessfully, to expel several of those involved). 

But in the end I felt that if I had participated in the debate and the vote, I had to 

accept the decision and so I spent the next few days and nights in Bristol University‘s 

Senate House. 

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Europe’s Journal of Psychology 

 

 
205 

It was the most remarkable few days for me. I had never known so many people 

debate so seriously and so intensely about something that would give them no 

personal benefit. The issue may have been a nursery, but the cause was equal 

access to University for women. And we talked long into the night about how to 

publicise and spread and win our cause. There was an intellectual intensity I had 

hoped to find in everyday student discussions – but hadn‘t. There was a sense of 

principle which I had been led to believe in but generally seen honoured in the 

breach. There was a sense of warmth and generosity between people that I 

remember still. Yet, when others (such as the University Vice-Chancellor) spoke of us, 

it was in terms of a very old pathologising language of ‗the mob‘. We were, he said, 

the gullible led by the culpable: immature students carried away in the group and 

exploited by seasoned activists. 

 

These two experiences, then, invoke the two sides of group psychology and 

underline the fact that groups create both the worst of worlds and the best of 

worlds. On the one hand, groups can dominate, denigrate, dehumanize and even 

destroy others. On the other hand, groups not only lead to bonds of care and 

solidarity internally, they also challenge and destroy systems of inequality between 

groups. Indeed, to borrow the old Trades Union slogan, the power of the powerless 

lies in their combination. Take away the ability to combine and hierarchy (or even 

tyranny) will always remain secure. 

 

To make the same point slightly differently and more generally, psychology — social 

psychology in particular, group psychology especially — needs to address both 

domination and resistance, stasis and movement, social reproduction and social 

change. Any approach which emphasizes the one to the exclusion of the other will 

necessarily be deficient in its ability to explain both. It may be that, over long periods 

of time, our social worlds seem stable and set and that their inequalities are destined 

to last. But change — underpinned by collective action — is always possible and 

should warn us against eternalizing what is generally only a temporary lull. Perhaps 

right now, when seemingly strong states like Tunisia and Egypt have folded like a 

pack of cards and who knows how many others will follow in their wake, this point 

should be easier to make than at other times. But the same might have been said in 

1789, 1830, 1848, 1871, 1917, 1968, 1989. Yet we seem to have short memories. This 

point at least tends regularly to be forgotten. 

 

This is an argument I have developed with Alex Haslam, and what follows has arisen 

out of our joint discussions and our joint work. It is as much Alex‘s as my own. 

 

 



 

 

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206 

Naturalising inequality 

 

The tendency to naturalise the social order, thereby to exclude social change and 

to make resistance futile, is as old as recorded social thought. Yet, in different ages, 

and under different social orders, the form of naturalization changes. We well 

remember Plato‘s division of humanity into men (and only men) of gold, men of 

silver, and men of bronze, each destined to fill different places in the social order. As 

Plato puts it (or at least, as Plato has Socrates explain to his pupil Adeimantus) only a 

tiny number of people are born with the intellectual and moral qualities to rule over 

the brutish mass (Plato, 380BC/1993). While vestiges of this sort of idea survive to this 

day (see, for instance, Leon Kamin‘s work on justifications of racial inequality and, in 

particular his magnificent 1993 essay with the irresistible title ‗On the length of black 

penises and the depth of white racism‘) such blatant elitism is generally out of favour 

in today‘s more democratic times. We tend to favour explanations which assign 

certain characteristics to all human beings — characteristics which make us naturally 

suited to the world as it is and which reduce any alternative to a hopeless fantasy.  

 

A combination of the (mis)use of evolutionary theorizing and the reductive use of 

powerful new technologies such as brain imaging has led to claims that everything 

from selfishness and exploitation to conflict and aggression are somehow inscribed 

into the human psyche (e.g. Buss, 2005; Dawkins, 1976; Pinker, 2002).  However, if one 

natural difference between types of people survives, it has to do with gender. Men, it 

seems, are not only ‗naturally‘ more aggressive and exploitative than women, it is 

natural for men to dominate, exploit, and even rape women (Thornhill & Palmer, 

2001). 

 

In part, at least, the growing influence of such naturalizing accounts can be put 

down to the decline of large scale social psychological studies of human behavior.  

Gradually, as the great field studies of the post-war period produced more and 

more spectacular evidence of the ways in which context could affect behavior, 

they raised more and more acute ethical issues about the acceptability of 

manipulating our social worlds. Already, in his ‗boys camp studies‘, Muzafer Sherif 

had shown how you can take well-adjusted and decent young boys and turn them 

to violence and aggression. The Sherifs (Muzafer and his wife Carolyn) famously 

issued ―a warning to psychologists to consider fully the importance of the 

background and the context of behavior in a social situation‖ (Sherif & Sherif, 1969, 

p. 252). They continued:  ―If an outside observer had entered the situation after the 

conflict began… he could only have concluded on the basis of their behaviour that 



 

 

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207 

these boys (who were the ‗cream of the crop‘ in their communities) were either 

disturbed, vicious or wicked youngsters‖. (1969, p. 254).  

 

In 1961 (we celebrate the half-centenary this year) Stanley Milgram went on to show 

how contextual manipulations could have as much impact on adults as on children 

and could lead ordinary Americans to deliver what they believed to be lethal 

electric shocks to another in a mock learning experiment. In 1971, Philip Zimbardo 

went even further and turned Californian students into either sadistic guards or else 

disturbed prisoners in his Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE).  

 

Enough was enough. Zimbardo‘s prison was so toxic that the two week study had to 

be halted after only six days. But more seriously, for the ensuing 40 years, it has been 

all but impossible to run such powerful studies again (though see Reicher & Haslam, 

2006 and www.bbcprisonstudy.org). Indeed, over time, we have not only retreated 

almost entirely into the laboratory, we have even eliminated interaction from the 

studies we conduct there (Haslam, & McGarty, 2001). The problem, then, if we 

cannot set up new and immersive social worlds in order to see how they impact 

upon people, is that other asocial explanations will prevail. It may be that anyone 

who sees just how dramatically someone can be turned from passivity to aggressivity 

by the circumstances they find themselves in (that is, someone who has access to 

the type of history whereby Sherif‘s youngsters were transformed from ‗the cream of 

the crop‘ to vicious antagonist) will never again be satisfied with static explanations 

of the phenomena. However, if we cannot see, or if that history is denied to us, then 

our explanations will likewise become skewed towards stasis. 

 

Conformity bias in classic social psychology 

 

But I am being too kind to my own. The problem isn‘t only that social psychology has 

been usurped from the outside. It also lies within social psychology itself. For, while 

the great field studies may have demonstrated the power of context, and hence 

shown how altered contexts lead to altered behaviours, they also went further (or, at 

least, they have generally been interpreted as going further). They have been used 

to argue that context is so powerful that it obliterates the individual, that people 

cannot resist the circumstances in which they find themselves and that they can only 

conform.  

 

Empirically, then, these studies impose particular contextual conditions upon 

participants. They don‘t address how people create or transform contexts for 

themselves – and even when they do (so, for instance, in Sherif‘s 1954 ‗Robber‘s 

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Psychology, domination and resistance 

 

 
208 

Cave boys camp study, the boys wanted to create competition as soon as they 

learnt of the existence of another group and before competitions were organized by 

the experimenters) this is generally ignored in the analysis. Thus context becomes 

something external to participants which contains and constrain show they 

(inter)act. It is not something that emerges out of these interactions themselves. 

 

This neglect is underpinned by theoretical approaches which, either by omission or 

by commission, deny agency to people especially in collective contexts. Thus, either 

a straight line is drawn from context to action as if people will always behave in set 

ways within a given context or else it is claimed that when people are engaged with 

others, they lose their capacity for critical judgment, they become thoughtless and 

they simply go along with whatever is suggested to them. This latter approach is 

common both to Milgram‘s ‗agentic state‘ account of the obedience studies 

(Milgram, 1974) and Zimbardo‘s role account of the Stanford Prison Experiment 

(Zimbardo, 2008). The difference is that, in Milgram‘s account, these suggestions 

require a leader to be present whereas in Zimbardo‘s account they are generated 

by the role itself without anyone being needed to spell out how one should act. 

 

As Moscovici (1976) noted, the conceptual problem with such a monolithic 

‗conformity bias‘ approach is that it leaves us with a one-sided social and group 

psychology. It invokes the power of the group context while at the same time 

pathologising group psychology. It stresses the power of immersion in groups to 

make people behave in toxic ways but it doesn‘t stress the power of the group to 

challenge toxic situations. It dramatizes domination but it downplays resistance. And 

to realize that all this is a problem, one doesn‘t have to make claims about the 

nature of the wider society. One can simply look at these classic studies themselves. 

For even if it is ignored in practice and denied in theory, all of them are dripping with 

resistance! 

 

In the boys camp studies, for instance, the attempts to divide groups of boys and set 

them up in competition against each other was not always successful. The second 

study, in 1953, resulted in the two groups getting together and refusing to believe 

that the other was their antagonist. This study was abandoned and never fully written 

up. As so often, those who challenge the reality of the experimenter are not used to 

study how people make their own history. Rather they are written out of (the official 

scientific) history. 

 

In Milgram‘s studies, the rate of obedience varied from 0% to 100%. So in effect they 

are studies of disobedience as much as obedience and the question needs to be 



 

 

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209 

less ‗why do people obey‘ than ‗when do people obey‘. These rather obvious points 

are somewhat obscured by the fact that, even if not entirely obliterated, the focus 

has been somewhat removed from the disobedient cases. In part this comes from 

reducing the complexity of the results by focusing on one version (dubbed the 

‗standard‘ version for no particularly good reason; Russell, 2011) which tends to be 

cited in textbook accounts and in which the clear majority of people do comply 

(Reicher & Haslam, 2011). In part it comes from Milgram‘s skills as a film maker and 

the fact that he only made available film of the compliant trials (Millard, 2010). These 

pictures, by now old and flickering, literally dominate the field. They perpetuate a 

misleading image of monolithic conformity. They stop us asking us about the ‗when‘ 

and lead us back to asking only why people obey. 

 

And when it comes to the Stanford Prison Experiment, it is hard to know where to 

start with tales of resistance. The prisoners resisted their roles from the start. At the end 

of the first day they were united and dominated the Guards. Until the very end, 

some prisoners continued to resist even if they had now become isolated. The 

Guards also resisted their roles. As Zimbardo himself acknowledges, some actively 

helped the prisoners, some were firm but fair, only a few were actively malicious. 

Indeed the evidence of mistreatment relates almost exclusively to one individual 

dubbed ‗John Wayne‘ for his aggressive swagger (Zimbardo, 1989). So, once more, 

a balanced account needs certainly to ask about domination. But it also needs to 

ask about resistance. Above all, it needs to ask what determines which 

predominates and which prevails; Haslam & Reicher, 2006, 2010). 

 

Conformity bias in contemporary social psychology 

 

These classics, of course, are now (as the term itself suggests) part of our history. Even 

if there has been little challenge to the conceptual account of the studies 

themselves, in the discipline as a whole such notions as agentic state or role 

immersion hold little sway. But I use these less for their own importance as exemplars 

of ‗conformity bias‘ approaches. And, if anything, such approaches have gained 

increasing sway in recent years. Take, for instance, the recent rise of system 

justification theory (e.g. Jost, Banaji & Nosek, 2004). The notion of system justification 

is originally taken from Henri Tajfel‘s work (Tajfel, 1981). In Tajfel‘s hands, this is but one 

of several functions of social stereotypes. Moreover, his interest (and the focus of his 

social identity theory) lies precisely in the structural and ideological dynamics which 

determine precisely when members of subordinated groups will accept an unequal 

status quo and when they will begin to challenge it (Tajfel & Turner, 1979). However, 

once the notion of system justification is inflated into a theory, all balance is lost and 



 

 

Psychology, domination and resistance 

 

 
210 

a construct which was meant to help us understand dynamic social processes is 

used to impede an understanding of such dynamics. The argument becomes lop-

sided again. The claim is that people have inherent tendencies to buy into their own 

oppression and that we cannot help but bolster the status quo. Sad, perhaps, but 

that is the way we are built (see Reicher, 2004). 

 

Similar points can be made about social dominance theory (Sidanius & Pratto, 1999), 

another approach which has gained great traction over the last decade or so. 

Again, there is nothing problematic about the concept of social dominance in itself. 

Moreover, there is much that is constructive and attractive in the work of Sidanius, 

Pratto and others: to start with, they put issues of power and inequality back at the 

core of social psychology, they point to the role of institutions and states in 

buttressing inequality, they demonstrate the impact of hierarchical beliefs (Sidanius, 

van Laar, Levin & Sinclair, 2003). But the problem lies in the fact that, in social 

dominance theory, social dominance (like system justification in system justification 

theory)  is not seen as an ideology, which is articulated by particular groups at 

particular times and discarded at others (cf. Schmitt, Branscombe & Kappen, 2003). 

That is, it is not seen as a variable which is to be explained in terms of social 

processes. It is seen as a constant which serves to exclude social variation. To be less 

cryptic, social dominance is seen as a stable individual difference, but also a stable 

group difference (e.g. men are higher in social dominance than women – the ‗iron 

law of andrancy‘ as they term it) which is underpinned by evolution. Thus the theory 

openly claims that hierarchy, dominance and inequality are an inevitable aspect of 

the human condition (see, for instance the title of a 1993 chapter by Sidanius & 

Pratto: ―The inevitability of oppression and the dynamics of social dominance‖). In 

this way social dominance provides yet another analysis in that long line going back 

to Plato and beyond which tells us that resistance is futile. 

 

As I write this, I am reading at home the autobiography of an Indian Dalit 

(‗Untouchable‘) woman Baby Kamble, who grew up in the early part of the 

twentieth century (Kamble, 2008). Her book is really more of a sociobiography. It tells 

of the condition and the fate of one of the most oppressed groups on earth. It tells 

how the untouchables, the women in particular, were seen and treated as 

subhuman. They ate the slops of the higher castes who considered even the sound 

of their voice as polluting. It also tells how they accepted their position and 

embraced the Hindu religion which rejected them. But it also tells of change, of how 

‗untouchable‘ became politicized as Dalit. It relates how people joined the 

movement led by Dr. Ambedkar (a far greater figure than Gandhi to these people), 

how they refused to serve the higher castes in the villages and how they converted 



 

 

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en masse to Buddhism. The book is a cry of rage against a system and a religion 

which lays people low. But even more it is a cry against those ‗untouchables‘ who 

still try to assimilate to this system and still accept an ideology of hierarchy.  

 

Kamble‘s book is entitled ‗The Prisons We Broke‘. The language is echoed in John 

Turner‘s trenchant critique of conservative psychological theory. His immediate 

target was Zimbardo‘s role account of the Stanford Prison Study (Turner, 2006), but it 

applies more generally to the various models I have outlined above. Turner argues 

against theories which imprison us in the present by denying our ability to challenge 

authority and alter inequality. He calls for us to break our theoretical prisons just as 

Kamble calls on Dalits to break their ideological prisons. Moreover, the two are linked 

insofar as psychological theory can (and often has) become a key part of the 

ideology which seeks to keep people in their place whether by justifying inequality 

through the attribution of different qualities to different groups of people (Gould, 

1983; Kamin, 1977) or else (as I have stressed here) by ruling out any alternatives to 

the existing social order (Tajfel, 1978). 

 

In ‗escaping our theoretical prisons‘ (as Turner advocates), we don‘t just gain a 

deeper understanding of how change can occur, we also gain an understanding of 

how the status quo is maintained. Indeed, the irony is that, by making social 

reproduction natural and inevitable, we lose sight of all the work at different levels — 

including the psychological — which goes into ensuring that social systems endure 

over time. How is it that certain groups legitimate their privileged position? How do 

they stop subordinate groups coming together to challenge them? In a 

contemporary world where bankers continue to get bonuses while others (including 

those of us in the academic sector) lose jobs and services because of the crisis that 

the bankers caused, these are pertinent questions for us all. To quote the Governor 

of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, why is the public not angrier than it is? (quoted 

in ‗Should we be more angry about the causes of the financial crisis?‘ The Guardian, 

March 2nd 2011)? In order to answer this question we need what we plainly do not 

have: a social psychological analysis of the processes of domination. 

 

Viewed in this way, it is clear that the analysis of resistance and the analysis of 

domination are not separate orders of enquiry. Rather they are two sides of the 

same coin – or rather, they constitute different outcomes from the same process. 

Domination results from the successful demobilization of challenges to the status quo 

whereas resistance results from successful mobilization. Moreover, demobilization is 

achieved by getting people to adopt a common categorization with those who are 

dominant, or at least by stopping seeing themselves and acting as a distinct group 

with antagonistic interests (see Haslam & Reicher, 2011). Mobilization is achieved 



 

 

Psychology, domination and resistance 

 

 
212 

precisely by creating a sense of autonomous selfhood amongst the subordinated in 

society — what in Marxist terms would be termed the group (specifically, class) for 

itself (für sich; Marx & Engels, 1848/2002).  

 

Domination and resistance in the Holocaust 

 

I started off by referring back to two formative experiences in my time as a 

psychologist — the Holocaust as a site of domination, an occupation as a site of 

resistance. But as time goes by, I become increasingly aware that as long as we 

separate out these issues and associate them with different phenomena, we miss the 

point. The point is that the same phenomena encapsulate both issues. One might 

well ask how can one study resistance as well as domination in the Holocaust? After 

all, the received wisdom is that the Holocaust was possible because people largely 

went like sheep to the slaughter, and if we occasionally focus on exceptions such as 

the Warsaw Ghetto uprising of 1943, that is precisely because they are exceptions 

(Mais, 2007-8). 

 

But in recent years, this viewpoint has been challenged on several fronts. To start 

with, Warsaw was far from unique. There were armed undergrounds in more than 90 

ghettos (Gurewitsch, 2007-8) and there were armed uprisings in three of the six Nazi 

extermination camps: Auschwitz, Treblinka and Sobibor (Arad, 1987; Suhl, 1975; 

Venezia, 2007). What is more, resistance didn‘t only take the form of uprisings (in 

which a few of the fighters might conceivably survive, but the weaker members of 

the the ghetto would inevitably be killed). It took other forms such as escape and 

joining the partisans (Epstein, 2008; Marrus, 1995). More radically still, it has been 

argued that even those in the Jewish Councils who ran the ghettos cannot be 

assumed to be passive and collaborationist. Rather their stance was rooted in a 

historical experience of oppression and of successfully surviving that oppression by 

hunkering down, maintaining communal organization and seeking to outlive the 

oppressor — a strategy known as iberleben (Engel, 2007-8). Clearly this strategy 

failed, because Nazi exterminationism was something radically new. But it is only in 

hindsight that we know this. At the time how could anyone believe that the Nazis 

would do something so extreme, so unprecedented and so ridiculous to people who 

were working hard in ghetto factories for their war effort? (Horwitz, 2010).  

 

In effect, then, everyone sought to resist the Germans but used more of less 

confrontational strategies as a function of how they understood the nature of their 

oppressor (Einwohner, 2009; Tiedens, 1997). So if it is true that Jews were led to be 

slaughtered, they did not generally go as sheep. Moreover, it would be dismissive to 



 

 

Europe’s Journal of Psychology 

 

 
213 

say that the resistance failed because most resistors died. Once they became aware 

of their fate, people sought to act in ways that would maintain Jewish dignity and 

empower Jewish people in the future. Whatever one‘s stance on the State of Israel, 

one should not underestimate the impact of Holocaust resistors on the success of 

subsequent struggles.  

 

I have just one more point to make about the Holocaust. It was precisely because 

they were aware of the potential for (and the reality of) resistance, that the Nazis 

went to such lengths to fragment Jewish solidarity. In the ghettos they went through 

countless elaborate charades to convince those left behind that deportations 

meant transfer to a better life rather than to certain death, a deception that they 

maintained even as people entered the camps and symbolized by the infamous 

sign over the gates to Auschwitz: ‗Arbeit Macht Frei‘ (Gutman, 1971; Horwitz, 2010). 

 

Once people were in the camps and the slaughter could no longer be hidden, other 

means were used to isolate people from the others whom were tightly packed 

together. Indeed the whole camp system was specifically design to stop people 

developing bonds of common identity and solidarity — the use of divide and rule, 

the system of preferments and privileges, the systematic use of humiliation and many 

other techniques besides (Sofsky, 1997; see also Haslam & Reicher, 2011). Passivity 

did not come naturally, it was actively produced. 

 

The Holocaust, then, is a site of domination and resistance. We cannot understand it 

without studying both. Nor can we understand either element without understanding 

the other. Unless we know what makes resistance effective we cannot tell what 

disrupts opposition and maintains the status quo. Unless we know what serves to 

maintain the status quo we cannot know what needs to be disrupted for resistance 

to flourish. 

 

As social psychologists, then, we must not counter the present unbalanced emphasis 

on domination by an equally unbalanced turn to resistance. We must study the two 

together. That is a major challenge. It is the challenge that brought me into 

psychology. It is the challenge which maintains my passion for our discipline. It is a 

challenge that will keep me busy for many years to come. 

 

References  

 

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Buss, D.M. (2005) The Murderer Next Door. London: Penguin. 

 

Dawkins, R. (1976) The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

 

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About the author: 

 

Stephen Reicher is currently Professor of Psychology at the University of St. Andrews. 

He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, an Academician of the Social 

Sciences, Scientific Consultant to Scientific American Mind and a past Editor of the 

British Journal of Social Psychology. Stephen's work concerns the relationship 

between social identity and collective action. Within this framework, he has studied 

such phenomena as crowd behaviour, intergroup hatred, leadership and 

mobilisation, national identification, and the psychology of tyranny. He has getting 

on for 200 publications in these and other areas. His latest book, with Alex Haslam 

and Michael Platow is The New Psychology of Leadership (Psychology Press 2010). 

 

Address for correspondence: Stephen Reicher, School of Psychology, University of St. 

Andrews, St. Andrews, Fife, KY16 9JU.  

Email: sdr@st-andrews.ac.uk