Muzafer Sherif

Introduction

Muzafer Sherif (1906–1988) was a Turkish-American social psychologist who helped turn social psychology from a philosophical discipline into an experimental one. Born Muzaffer Şerif Başoğlu in the Ottoman Empire, he emigrated to the United States in the 1930s and built a career around a single question: how do individuals' perceptions and actions come to be governed by the groups they belong to? His answers produced three bodies of work that are now standard textbook material — the laboratory study of how social norms crystallise out of ambiguity, realistic conflict theory and the field experiments on intergroup hostility conducted at Robbers Cave, and the social judgment approach to attitude change that he developed with Carl Hovland at Yale.

Sherif was unusual among mid-century American psychologists in insisting that laboratory findings be checked against real groups in real settings. That insistence produced the most famous field experiment in the discipline's history, and, as archival work published in 2018 showed, it also produced a study whose published account was considerably tidier than the events it described. Understanding both halves of that record is necessary for understanding what Robbers Cave can and cannot support.

Early Life and Education

Sherif was born on 29 July 1906 in Ödemiş, in the Aidin Vilayet of the Ottoman Empire, the second of five children in a prosperous family. His childhood coincided with the Italo-Turkish War, the Balkan Wars and the First World War, and his school years in İzmir overlapped with the Greek occupation of the city from 1918 to 1924 and the Turkish War of Independence. He later recalled that watching populations reorganise themselves under occupation shaped his interest in how collective identities form.

He took a bachelor's degree at the İzmir International College in the mid-1920s and a master's degree at the University of Istanbul, where he read the British psychologist William McDougall's hormic, goal-directed psychology and argued publicly for the modernising reforms of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. In 1929 he travelled to the United States and took a second master's degree at Harvard in 1932; his teachers there included Gordon Allport and Carroll Pratt. That same year he went to Berlin to hear Wolfgang Köhler lecture on Gestalt psychology, and returned convinced that Gestalt principles could be rebuilt into a theory of social perception.

He began doctoral work at Harvard but transferred to Columbia University, where he completed a PhD in 1935 under Gardner Murphy. His dissertation, "A Study of Some Social Factors in Perception," used the autokinetic effect and became the basis for his first book, The Psychology of Social Norms (1936).

Academic and Professional Career

Sherif returned to Turkey in 1937 as an assistant professor at the Gazi Institute in Ankara and moved to Ankara University in 1939. During this period he published Irk Psikolojisi (1943), a direct rebuttal of Nazi race theory, and criticised both the bureaucracy and pro-Nazi figures in Turkish academic life. He had contacts with the Communist Party of Turkey, and in 1944 he was detained for roughly four months after political conflicts at Ankara University. With the help of the United States Department of State and of the American psychologists Hadley Cantril, Leonard Doob and Gardner Murphy, he was released and returned to the United States permanently in 1945.

That year he took a position at Princeton as a fellow of the State Department and married Carolyn Wood, a research assistant who became a psychologist of standing in her own right and his collaborator for the rest of his life; they had three daughters. From 1947 to 1949 he was a Rockefeller research fellow at Yale, working in Carl Hovland's Yale Communication Research Program on attitude and attitude change, the collaboration that produced their 1961 book on social judgment.

In 1949 Sherif joined the University of Oklahoma, where he founded the Institute of Group Relations in 1952 and directed it, and where the camp studies were conducted. He moved to Pennsylvania State University in 1966, as visiting professor and then professor of sociology, and established its Psychosocial Studies Program. He retired to emeritus status in 1972 and died of a heart attack in Fairbanks, Alaska, on 16 October 1988, aged 82. Over his career he published some two dozen books and more than sixty articles and chapters.

His honours included a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (1967), the Kurt Lewin Memorial Award (1967) and the American Psychological Association's Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award (1968).

Major Contributions to Psychology

The formation of social norms

Sherif's doctoral experiments exploited the autokinetic effect: in a completely dark room, a stationary point of light appears to drift, because the eye has no frame of reference against which to judge it. Individual observers asked to estimate the distance the light moves produce idiosyncratic but highly consistent estimates. Sherif placed several people in the room together and had them call out their estimates aloud. Over repeated trials the estimates converged on a group value, and — critically — when the same individuals were tested alone a week or more later, they continued to give the estimate their group had settled on. Sherif's interpretation was that in an ambiguous situation people use one another as a reference point, and that the resulting norm is internalised rather than merely performed.

The experiment became the canonical demonstration that social reality can be constructed in the absence of any objective anchor, and it set up the problem that Solomon Asch later attacked from the opposite direction by giving participants an unambiguous stimulus and asking how many would still conform.

Realistic conflict theory and the Robbers Cave experiment

Sherif's best-known work argued that intergroup hostility is not a product of individual pathology or of mere contact, but of competition for scarce resources that only one group can win. Groups that compete, his theory holds, develop hostile stereotypes and internal solidarity; groups that must cooperate toward goals no single group can reach on its own will reduce that hostility.

The test was a field experiment run in 1954 at Robbers Cave State Park in Oklahoma. Twenty-two eleven-year-old boys, screened as psychologically normal and from intact middle-class families and unknown to one another, were brought to a summer camp in which the staff were in fact the researchers. The study ran in three phases. First the boys formed attachments within two separate groups, which named themselves the Eagles and the Rattlers. Then a tournament of competitions with prizes for the winners produced the predicted hostility — name-calling, raided cabins, burned flags. Finally, the researchers arranged problems that required both groups: a broken water supply and a lorry that would not start without all the boys pulling together. The hostility fell and cross-group friendships formed.

Earlier versions of the design had been run in 1949 and 1953 at other sites, and the 1954 study was the one written up as Intergroup Conflict and Cooperation: The Robbers Cave Experiment (1961), co-authored with O. J. Harvey, B. Jack White, William R. Hood and Carolyn W. Sherif.

Social judgment theory

Working with Hovland, and later with Carolyn Sherif and Roger Nebergall, Sherif developed an account of persuasion built on the claim that a message is not judged in the abstract but against the listener's existing position. Attitudes were described as latitudes of acceptance, rejection and noncommitment; the more ego-involved a person is in an issue, the wider the latitude of rejection and the narrower the latitude of noncommitment, and the harder they are to move. This approach departed from the learning-based models of the Yale programme by insisting that the meaning of a message is a function of the receiver's own standpoint.

Reference groups and natural groups

Sherif also pushed social psychology out of the laboratory and into existing groups. His study of adolescent cliques, Reference Groups (1964, with Carolyn W. Sherif), treated conformity and deviance as products of the groups a person actually belongs to rather than of artificially assembled aggregates, and supplied a vocabulary — reference group, membership group — that sociology adopted as readily as psychology did.

Major Publications

  • The Psychology of Social Norms (1936)
  • The Psychology of Ego-Involvements: Social Attitudes and Identifications (1947), with Hadley Cantril
  • An Outline of Social Psychology (1948)
  • Groups in Harmony and Tension: An Integration of Studies on Intergroup Relations (1953), with Carolyn W. Sherif
  • Social Judgment: Assimilation and Contrast Effects in Communication and Attitude Change (1961), with Carl I. Hovland
  • Intergroup Conflict and Cooperation: The Robbers Cave Experiment (1961), with O. J. Harvey, B. Jack White, William R. Hood and Carolyn W. Sherif
  • Reference Groups: An Exploration into Conformity and Deviation of Adolescents (1964), with Carolyn W. Sherif
  • In Common Predicament: Social Psychology of Intergroup Conflict and Cooperation (1966)
  • Social Psychology (1969), with Carolyn W. Sherif
  • Attitudes and Attitude Change: The Social Judgment-Involvement Approach (1980), with Carolyn W. Sherif and Roger E. Nebergall

Impact and Legacy

Sherif is one of the small number of social psychologists whose findings entered the field so completely that their authorship is no longer noticed: the internalised group norm, the superordinate goal and the latitude of acceptance are now taught without his name attached. His insistence that real groups in real settings must be studied, and not only sophomore subject pools, anticipated the field's later arguments about external validity by half a century.

The archival reappraisal of that field work is the most serious challenge to his reputation. In The Lost Boys: Inside Muzafer Sherif's Robbers Cave Experiment (2018), the Australian historian Gina Perry worked through Sherif's papers at the Archives of the History of American Psychology in Akron, Ohio, and traced surviving participants. Her central finding concerns a 1953 study at Middle Grove, New York, funded by a Rockefeller grant, which Sherif never published. There, the boys made friends across the intended dividing line, suspected the adults of engineering the conflict, and turned their resentment on the staff rather than on each other; Sherif abandoned the study. Perry documents that at Robbers Cave the researchers acted as camp counsellors and stage-managed outcomes — one assistant was instructed to stage a raid on a cabin — and that the published report, written in deliberately neutral language, reads very differently from the field notes. She also reports that Sherif's first draft of the 1949 study attributed the boys' behaviour to the dynamics of a competitive society of "haves and have-nots," a class analysis absent from the Cold War version that secured Rockefeller and military funding.

Two further lines of criticism are theoretical rather than historical. Henri Tajfel and John Turner's social identity theory showed, with the minimal group paradigm, that arbitrary categorisation alone — no competition, no prizes, no history — is enough to produce ingroup favouritism, which means competition cannot be a necessary condition for bias and that Robbers Cave may have over-attributed the hostility to the tournament. And Tyerman and Spencer's 1983 field study of English boy scouts, who already knew one another and whose leader actively encouraged cooperation, found competition across patrols stayed friendly and produced no rise in ingroup favouritism, suggesting that Sherif's design excluded the very variables — prior acquaintance, cooperative leadership — that determine whether competition turns into conflict.

Sherif's defenders, Perry among them, note that these critiques do not touch the two findings that survive in the archival record: mere contact between hostile groups made things worse, and cooperation toward a goal neither group could achieve alone made things better. Perry has said she does not regard Sherif as a charlatan, arguing that every journal article is written to persuade, and that the ambition of Robbers Cave — a genuine attempt on a large social question — is missing from the tightly controlled laboratory deceptions that followed. The ethical objections, however, are not in dispute: the boys were deceived, their parents were told only that the camp would build character, and none of the participants learned they had been subjects until decades later.

Learn More

References

  • Sherif, M. (1936). The Psychology of Social Norms. Harper.
  • Sherif, M., Harvey, O. J., White, B. J., Hood, W. R., & Sherif, C. W. (1961). Intergroup Conflict and Cooperation: The Robbers Cave Experiment. University of Oklahoma Book Exchange.

Last updated: 2026-10-20

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