This is a book of social psychology on group dynamics. But, first of all, it is a book with a precise dedication: it is dedicated to those who censored my university thesis, The Theory of Reality — and, with a certain irony, also to the students who witnessed it.
The dedication is not a whim: it is the thread that ties this book to everything that came after. The thesis the academy rejected argued that the mind does not know reality neutrally, but simplifies it, orders it, and distorts it. That principle, set aside in academia, returned right here — in the final Extra of this book — and would become the root of Primordial Psychology.
“When you watch the puppets, you understand how beautiful it is to think differently, move differently, and feel different things.” — Edoardo Zeloni Magelli
What group dynamics are
The book begins with the definition of a social group: a set of people who interact according to shared expectations, roles, status, and cohesion. The group is a fundamental structure of human life — family, school, play, work, cooperation, survival.
From there it enters group dynamics, with reference to Kurt Lewin and to the stages described by Bruce Tuckman: forming, storming, norming, performing, and adjourning. The interesting point is that the group is not just a social container: it is a field of forces that transforms its members. It generates attraction and fear, assigns roles, produces resistances, mirroring, and defenses. Within a group, a person can be pushed to confirm the image others have of them — or to call it into question.
Groups and Group Dynamics: contact in the intergroup and prejudice
Prejudice is one of the central themes of the human and social sciences, because it touches on questions of enormous relevance: the relationship with diversity, discrimination, coexistence, peace, interculturality. Interest in the theme intensified after the Second World War, in relation to totalitarian ideologies, the forms of racism that have marked recent history and, today, the large migratory phenomena crossing Europe.
In this book, prejudice is not treated as a simple individual opinion, but as a mental schema: a simplification and distortion of reality that arises within belongings, categories, and dynamics between groups. It is already, in other words, a social form of filtered reality.
According to the contact hypothesis (Allport, 1954), the encounter between members of different groups, under favorable conditions, can reduce prejudice.
In recent decades, several models — derived from social identity theory (Tajfel, 1981) — have extended this hypothesis, trying to understand how the positive effects of contact generalize from the outgroup members we know to those we do not. The book draws on the work of Allport, Tajfel, Turner, Sherif, Pettigrew, Tropp, Brown, Hewstone, Gaertner, and Dovidio.
But the text does not fall into naivety. Contact reduces prejudice only under certain conditions — equal status, cooperation, a common goal, personal relationships, institutional support — and can instead increase anxiety, distrust, and conflict when poorly structured. The largest meta-analysis on this subject, more than five hundred studies examined by Pettigrew and Tropp (2006), confirms that contact does tend to reduce prejudice, while showing that those conditions favor it without being indispensable. Factors such as anxiety, authoritarianism, and normative restrictions deserve particular attention: they are often the key to understanding when contact works and when it fails. More than an isolated, situational phenomenon, contact must be placed in a social, multilevel, and longitudinal context.
Halo effect, Pygmalion effect, and expectations that become reality
The book closes with two chapters especially close to what I work on today: the suggestions for teaching strategies and the Extra dedicated to the halo effect and the Pygmalion effect.
These are two mechanisms that show how expectations, initial judgments, and assigned roles can confirm or deform a person’s image, to the point of influencing their performance and behavior. It is the logic of the self-fulfilling prophecy, documented in the classic study by Rosenthal and Jacobson (1968): when the social environment treats someone according to an expectation, it often ends up producing exactly what it expected. A role can become a cage, and a group can turn into the place where an old program is confirmed — or, on the contrary, where new evidence can begin to call it into question. It is precisely the terrain on which Mental Reprogramming works.
From the Extra to the Theory of Reality
There is then the Extra that, over the years, turned out to be the most important. It is there that The Theory of Reality is recalled: man cannot fully know reality, because in order to survive he is forced to simplify and order it, losing data and generating a distorted reality, different from the original one.
It is the bridge between three moments of my path. The Theory of Reality shows that the mind filters, simplifies, and distorts. Groups and Group Dynamics shows that this filtered reality is not only individual, but also social: it arises within categories, belongings, roles, and expectations. And Primordial Psychology, many years later, will turn it into a mature model, based on filtered reality, acquired identity, and internalized programs.
In other words, the theme of filtered reality was already in my work long before Primordial Psychology took shape.
Where to find the book
Groups and Group Dynamics: Contact in the Intergroup and Prejudice is available in Italian, Spanish, and English, in print and digital editions, on Amazon and in more than 4,000 bookstores and distributors around the world. If you want to read it, you’ll find it without difficulty in the bookstore — physical or online — that you prefer.
