Lastly, she also had a strong desire to better the world, and because of these experiences, she decided to pursue a career in social psychology in order to accomplish this goal.
[4] With this goal in mind, Wood Sherif went on to obtain a master's degree from the University of Iowa in 1944 in social psychology under Wendell Johnson where she performed her first research on attitudinal constructs and also worked with Leon Yarrow to investigate how people respond to perspectives that are counter to their own.
She decided instead to return to graduate studies, and applied for a research assistant position with Muzafer Sherif at Princeton University, which initiated their career-long professional collaboration.
[4] Wood Sherif also devoted herself to teaching, creating both undergraduate and graduate courses at Pennsylvania State University to address issues in social psychology.
[5] As both a dedicated researcher and mentor, Carolyn made significant contributions to areas including leadership studies, gender identity, attitude, sports psychology, and persuasion.
In what is now considered a classic study in social psychology, Sherif and Wood Sherif examined intergroup hostility by observing 22 eleven-year-old boys over the course of an elaborate experimental summer camp setup where the boys were divided into two arbitrary groups, put into conflict and competition, and then integrated through cooperative tasks.
[9] Instead, negative attitudes can be reduced and positive intergroup relations can occur if both groups are required to unite and cooperate in order to achieve a goal.
[9] This study provided important empirical support for the realistic conflict theory, which outlines each of these experimental conclusions as its own theoretical arguments.
Wood Sherif later translated her expertise in group formation and competition to the emerging field of sports psychology.
Her definition of "competition" as a social process based on her work with the Robber's Cave Experiment became a standard for the new field that is still cited: Competition is a social process that occurs when a person's activities are directed more or less consistently toward meeting a standard or achieving a goal in which performance, either by the individual or by the group, is compared and evaluated relative to that of selected other persons or groups.
[12] She noted that the social environment could significantly affect the level of motivation an individual would have to perform in a given competitive process.
[11] In addition to talks at several sports psychology conferences, she was invited to speak to the Scientific Congress held before the 1972 Olympic Games on this topic (as the only female speaker to present).
In this work, Wood Sherif outlined social judgment theory, relating the involvement of the individual (the self) to situations of persuasion.
Additionally, Wood Sherif presented the conceptual framework of a "self-system," an organized collection of attitudes that has been molded by an individual's interactions with the social environment (e.g. family, religious institutions).
In these works, she states that gender is a sociological construct (a set of organized social categories) with both biological and cultural determinants.
[13][14] For example, a woman might be treated equally to men in her group of friends, but she might also feel her gender is inferior if she adheres to a religious institution that holds that attitude.
[7][13][14] She argued that accounting for the complexities in gender identity using this self-system approach could help explain the seemingly contradictory results obtained from studies using simple self-report measures or those that focused only on single attitudes.
[13][14] A group with little social power could still be very persuasive (e.g. acting helpless to get assistance), so Wood Sherif rejected the definition that combined the two concepts.
Note: Carolyn's work often went unnoticed, due to the fame of her husband, Muzafer Sherif, and her delay in obtaining a doctorate degree.
Many of these works cite Carolyn as a co-author or editor, some due to "corrections" of authorship made later which would list her husband as first author.
She was appointed the editor of the Journal of Social Issues as well, but due to her sudden death in July 1982, she was not able to receive this honor.