Intergroup conflict is a term that refers to disagreement or confrontation between two or more groups and their members. This confrontation can involve physical violence, interpersonal discord, and psychological tension.
The groups involved can be nations, ethnic groups, political parties, sports teams, religious communities, work teams, or gangs. Conflict ranges from verbal hostility to rioting and outright war.
Groups, not individuals, are in conflict. Individual members can be entirely reasonable people, yet their groups can still be locked in escalating hostility (Bornstein, 2003).
Intergroup conflict is a major shaper of group behaviour and cohesion. It has arguably influenced the evolution of group living itself (Hewstone & Greenland, 2000; Rusch & Gavrilets, 2020).
Key Takeaways
Definition: Intergroup conflict is disagreement or confrontation between the members of at least two different groups.
Escalation Models: The aggressor-defender, conflict-spiral, and structural-change models explain how intergroup conflict emerges and persists.
Beliefs: Perceptions of superiority, injustice, vulnerability, distrust, and helplessness commonly propel groups toward conflict.
Intensity Factors: Group size, composition, goal incompatibility, and dependence aggravate conflict. So do structural factors, meaning unequal distribution of power, resources, and status.
Historical Background
Thomas Hobbes offered the first systematic account in Leviathan (1651). He argued that humans are innately self-interested and will fight one another to survive and prosper in a world of scarce resources.
Later theorists offered variations on this claim. Darwin described competition for survival, and Freud described aggression as an instinctual drive. Intergroup conflict is not new.
From wars between countries to battles between gangs, intergroup conflict has always been a part of the human world (Hewstone & Greenland, 2000).
Systematic study began only in the early twentieth century. Social scientists usually aimed to work out how to reduce or manage conflict.
Gordon Allport was a pivotal figure. His 1954 book, The Nature of Prejudice, proposed the contact hypothesis. Under the right conditions, more contact between members of different groups reduces prejudice and, in time, conflict.
Allport’s contact hypothesis is among the most influential and best-supported theories in social psychology (Hewstone & Greenland, 2000).
Intergroup conflict arises from perceived differences between groups, and can lead to prejudice, discrimination, and reduced cooperation even when interests align.
Theories of Intergroup Conflict
Social psychology explains intergroup conflict from four complementary angles (Böhm et al., 2020). Each locates the cause in a different place.
Realistic Conflict Theory: competition between groups over scarce resources.
Social Identity Theory: the mere act of sorting people into “us” and “them”.
Relative Deprivation: the felt gap between what a group has and what it believes it deserves.
Social Dilemma Perspective: millions of individual choices to help the ingroup, harm the outgroup, or both.
Realistic Conflict Theory: Competition Over Resources
Muzafer Sherif (1966) argued that intergroup hostility stems from competition over scarce, mutually exclusive resources. These include territory, jobs, status, and political power. One group can only get what it wants at the other’s expense.
His strong claim was sufficiency. A conflict of interests alone is enough to generate hostility, negative stereotyping, and discrimination. No prior dislike or disturbed personality is needed.
Where resources are cooperative instead, the theory predicts the reverse. One group’s success helps the other. Superordinate goals, which both groups want but neither can reach alone, dissolve hostility (Sherif, 1958).
Sherif tested the theory in a three-stage field experiment at Robbers Cave State Park, Oklahoma, in 1954 (Sherif et al., 1961).
Aim: To test whether a manufactured conflict of interests, with no prior grievance, is enough to produce intergroup hostility, and whether cooperation can dissolve it.
Method: Twenty-two boys aged 11 to 12, strangers to one another, were randomly split into the Rattlers and the Eagles at a remote summer camp. Three stages followed: bonding, a zero-sum tournament, then superordinate goals.
Results: Competition rapidly produced verbal abuse, flag-burning, raiding, and fighting between groups with no prior animosity. Pleasant contact alone did not reduce the hostility, but superordinate goals did.
Conclusion: Competition over a scarce, exclusive resource is enough to manufacture hostility among well-adjusted strangers. Cooperation toward superordinate goals, not contact alone, undoes it (Sherif et al., 1961).
Social Identity Theory: Conflict From Categorisation
Where realistic conflict theory needs an actual conflict of interests, social identity theory (SIT) argues that categorisation alone can produce hostility (Tajfel & Turner, 1979).
No competition, prior contact, or shared history is required.
People derive part of their self-concept from group memberships. This is their social identity.
They are motivated to see those groups, and therefore themselves, positively. Turner (1975) traced this drive to social comparison between groups.
A positive social identity depends on the ingroup (the group a person belongs to) comparing favourably with outgroups (groups they do not belong to).
This motive is called positive distinctiveness. It readily produces ingroup favouritism, stereotyping, and outgroup discrimination, even when nothing tangible is at stake (Turner et al., 1979).
Aim: To test whether the mere act of categorising people into groups, with no self-interest, competition, or prior conflict, is enough to produce discrimination.
Method: British schoolboys were assigned to groups on a trivial basis, ostensibly their preference for paintings by Klee or Kandinsky. They then allocated points or money between anonymous ingroup and outgroup members, gaining nothing personally.
Results: Boys reliably favoured their ingroup. Many sacrificed the ingroup’s absolute gain to maximise the relative gap over the outgroup.
Conclusion: Categorisation alone, stripped of competition, self-interest, and prior history, is sufficient to trigger ingroup favouritism and outgroup discrimination (Tajfel, 1970; Tajfel et al., 1971).
Relative Deprivation: The Felt Gap
Relative deprivation is the gap between what a group has and what it feels it deserves (Davis, 1959). Hostility depends less on how badly off a group is than on how badly off it feels, compared with a chosen standard (Runciman, 1966).
Runciman distinguished two forms. Egoistic deprivation compares oneself with similar individuals and produces personal grievance. Fraternalistic deprivation compares one’s group with another group, and it is this form that produces intergroup hostility.
Deprivation is often most acute when a period of rising expectations is abruptly reversed, rather than during unrelenting hardship. Davies (1969) captured this pattern in his J-curve.
Vanneman and Pettigrew (1972) found that the most hostile individuals were not the most objectively disadvantaged.
Relative deprivation therefore supplies the subjective ingredient that resource-competition accounts leave out. A group can be objectively better off than a rival and still feel acutely deprived relative to it.
Social Dilemma Perspective: Ingroup Love vs. Outgroup Hate
A newer view treats conflict as a nested social dilemma. Behaviour that benefits one’s own group can be costly to the individual and harmful to the outgroup (Bornstein, 2003; Hardin, 1995).
Joining a conflict is individually costly, in time, money, or risk. It helps the group only if enough members contribute, like the classic public-goods dilemma (Bornstein, 1992).
This perspective separates two motives that earlier theories run together. Ingroup love is helping one’s own group. Outgroup hate is actively harming, or withholding help from, the opposing group.
Halevy, Bornstein, and Sagiv (2008) built a game to pull the two motives apart.
Aim: To test whether participation in intergroup conflict is driven mainly by benefiting the ingroup (ingroup love) or by harming the outgroup (outgroup hate).
Method: Participants played an intergroup prisoner’s-dilemma game. Contributing to the ingroup could either harm the outgroup as well, or help the ingroup without harming anyone.
Results: Contributions were consistently higher when helping the ingroup did not require damaging the rival group.
Conclusion: Participation is driven mainly by ingroup loyalty, not by a primary wish to harm the outgroup. Outgroup hostility looks like a secondary by-product of ingroup favouritism (Halevy et al., 2008).
This finding has a practical implication. In a field experiment, Erev, Bornstein, and Galili (1993) tested constructive intergroup competition, in which groups compete on cooperative internal effort. They showed that it can solve the free-rider problem, the temptation to let others do the work, without anyone harming a rival group.
The perspective also has a neurobiological complement. In a double-blind, placebo-controlled study, De Dreu et al. (2010) found that oxytocin, popularly known for promoting bonding and trust, increased ingroup favouritism.
Oxytocin also modulated defensive aggression toward competing groups, but not unprovoked hostility. The authors called the pattern parochial altruism: generosity within the group alongside guardedness toward outsiders.
How the Theories Fit Together
These accounts are best read as complementary. Competition and categorisation are not simple rivals. Even in Sherif’s own study, ingroup favouritism and outgroup derogation appeared once each group learned the other existed. This came before the competitive tournament began (Sherif et al., 1961).
Realistic conflict theory alone cannot explain that, but social identity theory predicts it directly. The most defensible position combines them. Categorisation lays the psychological groundwork. Resource competition then intensifies and channels the conflict.
Both accounts agree on the remedy: superordinate goals that require genuine cooperation reduce hostility.
Relative deprivation adds the subjective dimension. Fiske (2004) argues that perceived threat, not objective threat, predicts hostility. He also argues that intangible outcomes such as status and pride drive conflict more reliably than tangible resources.
The social-dilemma perspective asks a different question: what makes any individual take part once conflict exists? Its answer is ingroup loyalty rather than outgroup animus. That suggests prosocial ways to serve one’s own group are a more direct lever than softening attitudes toward the outgroup alone (Erev et al., 1993).
Reducing Conflict: Superordinate Goals and Contact
Superordinate goals are the most direct application of realistic conflict theory. They matter to both groups. Only cooperation can achieve them.
At Robbers Cave, manufactured crises forced the Rattlers and Eagles to cooperate. These included a failed water supply, a truck that would not start, and a film neither group could afford alone.
Pleasant contact alone had failed. Cumulatively, the crises dissolved the hostility (Sherif et al., 1961; Sherif, 1958).
Allport’s (1954) contact hypothesis holds that structured contact reduces prejudice only under four conditions:
Equal Status: The groups meet on an equal footing.
Common Goals: Both groups work toward the same aims.
Cooperation: The groups depend on one another to reach those aims.
Institutional Support: An authority, law, or custom backs the contact.
Robbers Cave supplied the negative half of this claim. Contact without cooperation failed. The much larger contact literature supplies the positive half.
The strongest recent field evidence is reviewed under Contemporary Research below.
Intergroup Conflict Models
There have been numerous conflict models that have emerged over time. These models of conflict escalation can act either exclusively or in concert with each other.
Aggressor-Defender: One group frames the other as an aggressor and raises its own deterrent power in response.
Conflict Spiral: Each side reacts punitively or defensively to the other, so hostilities escalate and trap both.
Structural Change: A long conflict leaves enduring changes that perpetuate it, such as powerful military elites.
The Aggressor-defender Model
The aggressor-defender model dominates the thinking of many leaders in public life. One group sees the other as an aggressor.
This could occur in a conflict including warfare among nations, strife between racial groups, controversies among scientists, and so on.
The aggressor is seen as motivated by evil and illegitimate aims, while the one being aggressed upon by noble, morally correct, and legitimate motivations.
As a result, following this logic, the ones being aggressed must increase their deterrent power to ensure that the aggressors cannot reach their goals (Rusch & Gavrilets, 2020).
The Conflict-spiral model
Meanwhile, the conflict-spiral model contends that conflict breeds conflict. In turn, each party extends and intensifies the conflict by reacting in a punitive or defensive way to the other party’s behavior.
Consequently, a continuing spiral of escalation ensues, trapping both parties. The initial source of friction matters little once the spiral is under way.
Rather than focusing on the initial cause, the conflict-spiral model describes the dynamic, interactive process of escalation. Individuals or groups find themselves caught in an upward spiral of hostilities (Rusch & Gavrilets, 2020).
The conflict spiral model does not only describe escalation. De-escalation of intergroup conflict can occur in a spiral fashion.
For example, the strategic arms limitation talks and summits between the United States and the Soviet Union caused a step-by-step retreat from nuclear confrontation. Each side’s small concession made the next concession from the other side more likely (Rusch & Gavrilets, 2020).
The Structural Change model
The structural-change model also concerns how parties interact as a conflict unfolds. Unlike the conflict-spiral model, it holds that a long conflict produces enduring changes.
These changes then perpetuate the conflict on their own.
For example, military elites often gain large amounts of power during a war. They may gain a stake in perpetuating hostilities so that they will not lose their power and privileges to civilian authorities (Rusch & Gavrilets, 2020).
There is one major caveat. Not all conflicts last long enough to bring about major institutional change. Many societies simply revert to something like their pre-conflict state once the dispute is resolved.
Belief Domains and Examples of Intergroup Conflict
Eidelson and Eidelson (2003) identify five belief domains that recur across historical conflicts. These beliefs reliably propel groups toward hostility. Each operates at both an individual and a group level.
Superiority: The conviction that one’s group is better than others, as in the Nazi ideology of Aryan racial purity.
Injustice: The belief that one has been treated unfairly, as in the Syrian civil war.
Vulnerability: The belief that one is exposed to harm from others, as in the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Distrust: Doubt about the other party’s motives, as in the Cold War.
Helplessness: A sense of powerlessness, as in the lead-up to the Rwandan genocide.
Their analysis is a theoretical synthesis illustrated through historical case examples, not a controlled empirical test.
Superiority
At an individual level, beliefs of superiority revolve around a person’s enduring notion that he or she is better than other people in important ways.
At the group level, this translates into the belief that one’s own group has a superior cultural heritage to others. This often leads to a sense of entitlement and a desire to protect that heritage from contamination by outsiders.
The Nazi party offers a stark example. Its ideology was built on the claim of Aryan racial purity and superiority.
This produced a sense of entitlement to land and resources. That entitlement fed directly into conflict. Ultimately, it led to war (Eidelson & Eidelson, 2003).
Injustice
A second set of beliefs that commonly leads to intergroup conflict is injustice. It means believing one has been treated unfairly.
At the individual level, a person may feel passed over for a promotion. At the group level, a minority group may feel it has been discriminated against.
Such feelings of injustice can lead to a desire for revenge or retribution. The civil war in Syria is one example.
The conflict began as a peaceful protest against the government. It escalated into a full-blown civil war when the government cracked down on the protesters.
The result was a cycle of violence (Eidelson & Eidelson, 2003).
Vulnerability
A third set of beliefs concerns vulnerability. People who hold it believe they are exposed to harm from others.
At the individual level, a person may feel personally threatened. At the group level, a country may feel threatened by another country’s military buildup.
These feelings of vulnerability can lead to a desire for self-protection or even preemptive strikes. One example is the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
The United States justified the invasion by claiming that Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction. They could be used against the United States or its allies (Eidelson & Eidelson, 2003). That claim was later disproven.
Distrust
A fourth set of beliefs concerns distrust. At the individual level, a person may not trust someone else. At the group level, one country may doubt another country’s motives.
Distrust can lead to a desire to distance oneself from the other party. It can even prompt an attack.
The Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union is one example. The two superpowers distrusted each other’s motives.
They engaged in a long period of competition and tension that led to several crises, such as the Cuban Missile Crisis (Eidelson & Eidelson, 2003).
Helplessness
The fifth and final set of beliefs concerns helplessness. At the individual level, a person may feel powerless. At the group level, a country may feel it cannot defend itself against another country’s aggression.
Feelings of helplessness can lead to despair or resignation. Paradoxically, they can also prompt a turn to extreme violence as a last resort. One example is the Rwandan genocide.
Sections of the Hutu majority in Rwanda felt helpless. That perceived helplessness preceded the mass killing of Tutsis (Eidelson & Eidelson, 2003).
Intergroup vs. Intragroup conflict
While intergroup conflicts occur between groups, intragroup conflict happens within them.
For example, intragroup conflict can occur when people on a work team have different opinions about how best to accomplish a specific goal — such as between workplace departments.
Meanwhile, intergroup conflict occurs between teams that most often have adversarial goals, such as between warring nations or competing companies (Eidelson & Eidelson, 2003).
Factors influencing the intensity of intergroup conflict
Intensity is the degree to which the parties commit resources and energy to defeating each other. It depends on several identifiable factors (Fisher, 2000).
Group Size: Larger groups have more internal disagreement and more friction with outsiders, and are harder to coordinate.
Composition: More heterogeneous groups hold more divergent opinions and values, and subgroups may distrust one another.
Goal Incompatibility: Each group pursues its own aims while trying to block the other’s.
Dependence: Groups that need each other’s resources are pushed into competition and may feel threatened.
Structural Factors: Social inequality breeds a sense of unfair treatment, which can fuel conflict.
Group Size
One important factor is group size. All else being equal, the larger the number of people in a group, the more likely it is to be involved in an intergroup conflict.
This is because there are more potential sources of disagreement and more opportunities for people with different opinions to come into contact with each other.
Additionally, large groups are more difficult to control and coordinate than small ones, making it harder for leaders to prevent or resolve disagreements (Fisher, 2000).
Composition
Another important factor is composition. The more heterogeneous a group is, the more likely it is to be involved in an intergroup conflict.
A heterogeneous group is one whose members differ in race, ethnicity, religion, gender, age, and so on.
People from different backgrounds are more likely to hold different opinions and values. Disagreements follow.
Additionally, people from different groups may be unfamiliar with or even distrustful of each other, which can further contribute to conflict (Fisher, 2000).
Goal Incompatibility
The more incompatible the goals of the two groups are, the more likely it is that they will come into conflict with each other.
This is because each group will be trying to achieve its own goals while simultaneously trying to prevent the other group from achieving its goals.
For example, two countries that are vying for control of the same piece of land are likely to come into conflict with each other (Fisher, 2000).
Dependence
Another factor is dependence. The more one group depends on another, the more likely the two are to come into conflict. One group may need the other’s resources to survive.
This is because groups that are dependent on each other are often in a position where they must compete with each other for scarce resources.
Additionally, groups that are dependent on each other may also feel threatened by each other, leading to further conflict (Fisher, 2000).
Dependence is not always destructive, however. Erev, Bornstein, and Galili (1993) found in a field experiment that competition around cooperative internal effort can raise group performance without the same escalation.
Structural Factors
There are also a number of structural factors that can contribute to the intensity of intergroup conflict. Structural factors are features of the social environment that shape people’s interactions with each other (Fisher, 2000).
One important structural factor is social inequality. Social inequality is the unequal distribution of resources, power, and status within a society.
Inequality can lead to intergroup conflict. Disadvantaged groups often feel, correctly or not, that they have been treated unfairly. They may seek to redress the imbalance through protest or violence.
Social inequality can also lead to intragroup conflict. Members of the same disadvantaged group compete with one another for scarce internal resources, such as power, status, or, in extreme conditions, food (Fisher, 2000).
Critical Evaluation of Intergroup Conflict Research
The classic evidence for these theories has ethical, cultural, and conceptual limits. Newer research refines it rather than overturning it. Four limits stand out:
Ethical Concerns: Robbers Cave caused real distress among children who had not consented.
Generalisability: The classic samples were Western and narrow, and cultural norms change the pattern.
Open Questions: Whether competition or categorisation drives a given conflict remains unsettled.
Descriptive Models: The escalation models and belief domains explain conflicts after the fact, not in advance.
Ethical Concerns
The most important evidence for realistic conflict theory and for the superordinate-goals remedy is Sherif’s Robbers Cave study. It deliberately manufactured real fights, raids, theft, and distress among boys aged 11 to 12.
The boys had not given informed consent. They did not know they were research participants (Sherif et al., 1961).
That the boys left the study reconciled does not remove the harm. Genuine, if temporary, distress was inflicted on children purely to observe how conflict develops. The design would not gain ethical approval today.
An earlier, abandoned 1953 attempt at Middle Grove, documented by Perry (2018), shows how fragile such manipulations are. It failed outright once participants detected what was happening. The design therefore carries a methodological risk as well as an ethical cost.
Robbers Cave drew on 22 white, Protestant, middle-class American boys. Tajfel’s original minimal-group studies drew on British adolescent schoolboys. Neither sample spans the cultures to which the theories are applied.
Eidelson and Eidelson’s (2003) belief domains are illustrated with global cases, including Nazi Germany, Syria, Rwanda, and the Cold War. They remain a theoretical analysis of historical cases. They are not a systematic cross-cultural test.
Wetherell (1982) ran a cross-cultural replication of the minimal-group approach. Polynesian children in New Zealand behaved more generously toward outgroups than white children did.
The competitive us-versus-them pattern found in Western samples is therefore not a human universal. Cultural norms around cooperation moderate it. This qualifies every theory above, because all were built and tested mainly on Western, English-speaking, often adolescent samples.
Open Questions and Rival Explanations
Whether competition or categorisation drives a given real-world conflict is still an open empirical question. Even in Sherif’s own study, ingroup favouritism appeared before the tournament began, which competition alone cannot explain.
Tyerman and Spencer (1983) studied well-acquainted scout groups under cooperative leadership. The groups stayed friendly even under direct competition. That suggests competition is not sufficient on its own.
It contradicts Sherif’s central claim under conditions Robbers Cave excluded by design: prior friendship, familiar surroundings, and cooperative leadership. Both theories do converge on the remedy: superordinate goals requiring genuine cooperation reduce hostility.
The social-dilemma evidence is also narrow. It comes mainly from Western student and fan samples playing incentivised games for modest stakes. Whether the same pattern holds in high-stakes, non-Western, or actively violent conflicts is untested.
Descriptive Rather Than Predictive Models
Realistic conflict theory and social identity theory generate falsifiable hypotheses that have been tested in controlled experiments. The escalation models and the five belief domains have not.
Rusch and Gavrilets (2020) reviewed the escalation models as descriptive typologies of how conflicts commonly unfold. Eidelson and Eidelson (2003) fitted their five beliefs to well-known conflicts after the fact.
Both are useful diagnostic frameworks for practitioners. But they cannot yet say in advance which conflicts will escalate along which trajectory, or which belief will dominate in a new dispute.
A pre-registered, prospective study would address this. It would track a live conflict from its early stages and predict which trajectory it follows.
All existing support is retrospective. This is a genuine evidential gap alongside the controlled experimental literature.
Contemporary Research
Two questions have driven research since 2015. What drives individuals to take part in conflict? Do interventions that reduce it work outside the laboratory?
The strongest available evidence on each question sits well above the single-study evidence the older literature relied on. One is an incentivised behavioural experiment. The other is a large meta-analysis of field interventions. The account below is weighted accordingly.
Ingroup Love or Outgroup Hate in Real Rivalries?
Halevy and colleagues’ finding left open whether ingroup love also dominates among real rival groups, rather than artificial laboratory ones. Weisel and Böhm (2015) tested this, including for rivalries framed in moral terms.
Aim: To test whether contributions to real intergroup conflicts are driven mainly by ingroup love or outgroup hate, and whether moral rivalry shifts the balance.
Method: Participants chose between keeping money, helping their own group, or helping it while harming the rival. Study 1 involved 395 supporters of four German football clubs; Study 2 involved 1,550 students identifying with German political parties.
Results: Ingroup-benefiting contributions clearly outweighed outgroup-harming ones, and rivalry raised hostility mainly by withholding help. Moral rivalry was the exception: most withheld even costless help from far-right supporters, and active harm rose sharply.
Conclusion: Ingroup love, not outgroup hate, drives participation in real conflicts, but this restraint weakens once a rivalry becomes moral (Weisel & Böhm, 2015).
Because it used real groups and real money, the design has stronger ecological validity than minimal-group laboratory paradigms.
Its limits are that an economic game cannot capture the emotional texture of real conflict, and both samples came from a single Western, university-adjacent population.
The authors suggest that channelling competitive energy toward internal, ingroup-benefiting goals, rather than toward harming a rival, is a practical route to less destructive competition.
Does Reducing Conflict Work Outside the Laboratory?
Lemmer and Wagner (2015) meta-analysed real-world contact interventions. They tested whether Allport’s contact hypothesis holds outside controlled experiments. The programmes used direct (face-to-face) or indirect (extended or virtual) contact.
The pooled data covered 123 comparisons (11,371 participants) assessed shortly after each programme. A further 25 comparisons (1,650 participants) were assessed at least a month later.
Overall, contact interventions improved ethnic attitudes. The pattern was consistent:
Persistence: The improvements lasted over time.
Method: Both direct and indirect contact were successful.
Setting: Programmes worked even amid a serious societal conflict, such as the Middle East.
Beneficiaries: Effects were typically larger for ethnic majorities, but minorities benefited too.
Generalisation: Effects spread from the individuals in a programme to the outgroup as a whole.
Indirect contact can scale far more cheaply than in-person programmes. A natural next step is a large, pre-registered field trial comparing digitally mediated and direct contact in a genuine post-conflict setting.
Net Assessment
Taken together, post-2015 evidence refines rather than overturns the classic picture. Sherif’s competition and Tajfel’s categorisation both still drive conflict.
Once conflict starts, it looks sustained less by symmetrical mutual hatred than by asymmetrical ingroup loyalty. That loyalty tips into active harm chiefly when a rivalry becomes moralised (Weisel & Böhm, 2015).
On the resolution side, the field-intervention evidence (Lemmer & Wagner, 2015) gives the decades-old prescription of structured cooperation between groups genuine real-world support.
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BSc (Hons) Psychology, MRes, PhD, University of Manchester
Chartered Psychologist (CPsychol)
Saul McLeod, PhD, is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years of experience in further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology.
Charlotte Nickerson is a Harvard graduate and cognitive engineer whose work sits at the intersection of social psychology, human behaviour, and technology design. She contributed over 100 articles to Simply Psychology and holds a Master's in Cognitive Engineering from ENSC.
