Muzafer Sherif

Sherif then obtained MA degree from the Istanbul University in 1928,[1] where he also expressed his support for the modernization of Turkey during political debates[2] and gathered interest in goal-oriented behaviour, or hormic psychology as proposed by British psychologist William McDougall.

[2] Sherif went to America during the peak of the Great Depression, earning an MA from Harvard University where his teachers were Gordon Allport and Caroll Pratt.

He returned to the U.S. in 1933 and re-enrolled at Harvard for his Doctoral studies, but later switched to Columbia University, where he earned a Ph.D. in 1935 under Gardner Murphy.

In it, he compared Soviet and American societies, by showing different values and beliefs of the nations which flowed from different social and cultural contexts.

Sherif fled back to America shortly after his detainment in Turkey in 1945 due to fear of a harsher and longer punishment for his association with the Communist Party.

[2] Sherif was officially fired as a professor at Ankara University, and was legally liable for salary debt to the Turkish government during his residence in the U.S.[2][3] Sherif's marriage to his American wife, Carolyn Wood, led to his dismissal because it violated policies banning the marriage of Turks to foreigners.

[2][3] Although mostly recognized as a psychologist, Sherif was the first to obtain the Cooley-Mead Award for Contributions to Social Psychology from the American Sociological Association.

Sherif's experimental study of autokinetic movement demonstrated how mental evaluation norms were created by human beings.

When invited back individually a week later and tested alone in the dark room, participants replicated their original groups' estimates.

[5] In the 1954 experiment, "22 white, fifth grade, 11 year old boys with average-to-good school performance and above average intelligence with a protestant, two parent background were sent to a special remote summer camp in Oklahoma, Robbers Cave State Park."

Sending them to such a remote location was done to reduce the influence of external factors and better allow "the true nature of conflict and prejudice" to be studied.

The researchers then attempted to reduce the prejudice between the groups, and found that simply increasing their contact with each other made matters worse.

In 1977, while at Pennsylvania State University Sherif published a paper [6] identifying problem areas in Social Psychology as well as solutions towards them.

He believes this is recognized by other social psychologists high in the field such as Harry Triandis, and acknowledges that some may disagree with his opinion.

Despite this vast increase, Sherif believes that the studies don't build off of each other so it is hard to argue from common ground when variables, tasks, and measures are not consistent.

He also mentions how social psychology has become more individualistic, focusing on internal states like "dissonance, attitudes, [and] attributions", rather than properties of a group.

Sherif blames reductionism, where the phenomena of groups was reduced to interpersonal reaction and ahistoricalism which removed situational factors from consideration.

To remedy this he cites Albert Pepitone's stance that social psychology should focus on research normative in substance (address sociocultural perspectives) and comparative methods.

This leads to a loss of direction for the field as rather than working together on a shared paradigm, researchers are in "self-contained castles" within psychology, but also across disciplines in the social sciences.

Clyde Hendrick, asked his colleagues about the "crisis" in the social psychology field and had researchers provide arguments on the following topics: - Scientific vs Historical - Environmental vs Social Psychologies - Field vs Experimental research - Grand theory vs Smaller operational theories vs belief that the field is doing well Following Psychologists participated: Y. Epstein, D. Stokols, H. Pronshansky, I. Altman, M. Mania, K. Gergen, B. Schlenker, A. Greenwald, C. Hendrick, W. Thorngate, R. Harris, P. Secord, M. B. Smith, D. Forsyth, S. Baumgardner, B.

This is likely as Akan Elm's states that Social Psychology is still in its "pre-paradigmatic stage of development" and any sort of yield should be celebrated.

This will help to create commonly shared paradigms, to remove those from their "castles" and disband "disorderly faction-infested tribes" for the greater good of science.

The latitude of rejection explores the variety of ideas that an individual perceives to be disagreeable and not deemed considerable.

Furthermore, ego involvement is significant in the theory of social judgement as individuals who do not provide an importance to an issue, determine that they consist of broad latitude of noncommitment.

[7] During his career, Sherif authored and coauthored 24 books and over 60 journal articles and chapters which are still influential in the field of psychology.

This was the peak of his scholarly activity that resulted in 12 books and 43 research articles and chapters on various topics like attitudes, properties of natural and experimentally created groups on perception, anchoring effects of psychophysical scales, judgment, and self-functioning, etc.

[1] Although he wrote many texts and research in psychology, his best-known work during his 16 years stay at Oklahoma is the Inter-group Conflict and Cooperation: The Robber's Cave Experiment (with O. J. Harvey, B. J.