Sherif, Muzafer (19061988)

Sherif's Personal and Intellectual History

According to the historian Gardner Murphy, who also supervised Sherif's PhD dissertation, social psychology in the 1930s saw the disparate contributions of F. C. Bartlett's studies of (socially transmitted) remembering, the German school of Gestalt psychology, and Kurt Lewin's field theory to North American social psychology. What Sherif supplied was the alignment of an experimental commitment with reallife observations that together defined how people respond socially. This holistic approach was new in its time and was the substance of two major publications, Some Social Factors in Perception (1935), based on Sherif's dissertation, and its expansion in his Psychology of Social Norms (1936).

Sherif was born in 1906 in Turkey, completed a master's degree there, and then earned a second master's degree at Harvard in 1932. He returned to a post as instructor at the Gazi Institute, in Ankara, Turkey, where he commenced an investigation of norm formation. He then reentered the United States to continue his work at Harvard and completed his PhD dissertation on this topic at Columbia University in 1935 under Murphy's supervision. He returned to Turkey again in 1937, taking the first of several academic posts there and doing both basic and applied research in social psychology. He was ultimately appointed to a professorship at Ankara University. He left his homeland for the last time in 1945, extremely concerned by Turkish support for Nazism. In particular, he rejected the acceptance of genetic racial theory by the Turkish government and by officials and colleagues at his university. His protests led to his temporary arrest. His eventual release and return to the United States was sponsored by the U.S. State Department and aided by several American academics, including influential figures such as Hadley Cantril, Leonard Doob, and Murphy.

In 1945, Sherif married Carolyn Wood, who became an eminent social psychologist in her own right. Together, they coauthored several publications, including key works reporting experimental studies of intergroup relations. He held posts at several institutions, spending the longest time at the University of Oklahoma, and finally moved to his last position, at Pennsylvania State University, where he worked until his retirement in 1972. He received a number of prestigious awards and honors throughout his distinguished career.

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