Sherif, Muzafer (19061988)

Few can match the impact that Muzafer Sherif had on social psychology in the mid-20th century. His interests were wide ranging, including the self, social judgment, communication, reference groups, and attitude formation and change. But his most influential work was his early research on social norms and perception in the mid-1930s and his intergroup relations experiments carried out some 20 years later. The latter experiments provided the basis for his realistic conflict theory. It is his work on these two topics, based on an innovative use of the experimental method, that had major impact on both theory and research in social psychology. The common threads in his work were the ways that attitudes, internalized norms, and aspects of the self provide people with a frame ...