Hundreds of studies have been conducted to detect, from a more or less ‘sociographic’ viewpoint, how members of different social groups perceive their own groups and those of others. Undoubtedly, much of this research on discrimination, prejudice and social stereotypes, for which the segregationist ideology of the USA and the nazi regime in Europe formed the dark sociological background, has its origin in a will to understand ‘this inhuman but all too human’ behaviour. Nevertheless, important as this area of research may be in trying to reveal the effect of a given ideology, the work deriving from the problems between groups has, for a long time, only enabled us to describe or construe a dated and localized ‘geo-psychological’ chart of the characteristics attributed by different social groups to each other.

This chapter proposes to analyse certain tendencies of recent research in social psychology in the area of intergroup relations, research in which the aim is not only descriptive but also explanatory in that it tries to clarify certain mechanisms underlying intergroup relations.

Certainly Sherif, in the 1950s, offered a theoretical formulation allowing us to take into account the development of certain types of intergroup relations. However important Sherif's theory may be, he is primarily concerned with competitive and cooperative interaction between groups, and as such his research seems insufficient to explain other forms of relations. One has to wait until the 1960s to find a more general social psychological analysis of intergroup relations.