Muzafer Sherif

Muzafer Sherif was a Turkish-American social psychologist whose research examined how social norms form and how competition and cooperation shape relations between groups.

Robbers Cave experiment: A 1954 field study in which researchers examined conflict and cooperation among boys at a summer camp. Sherif’s best-known study tested how competition between groups could produce hostility and shared goals reduce it.
Normative social influence: Influence arising from a desire to gain acceptance or avoid social disapproval. Sherif’s group judgments show how a shared standard can shape individual responses.
Carolyn Wood Sherif: An American social psychologist whose research addressed social judgment, identity, and intergroup relations. She was Sherif’s collaborator and contributed substantially to the research associated with his name.
University of Istanbul: A public research university in Istanbul, Turkey, founded in 1453. Sherif studied psychology there before continuing his education in the United States.
Intergroup relations: Patterns of interaction, attitudes, and power between social groups. Sherif’s research became a major framework for studying how relations between groups change.
Autokinetic effect: An illusory movement of a stationary point of light in darkness, caused by the absence of visual reference points. Sherif used this perceptual ambiguity to study how people form shared estimates under uncertainty.
Informational social influence: Influence arising when people use others’ judgments as evidence about an uncertain situation. The ambiguous light task made other people’s estimates useful information for participants.
Kurt Lewin: A German-American psychologist known for field theory and influential research on group dynamics. Lewin’s group-dynamics tradition helped shape the questions Sherif pursued.
Harvard University: A private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, founded in 1636. Sherif completed graduate study at Harvard and developed his research in American psychology.
Group dynamics: The patterns of interaction and change that occur within and between groups. His studies helped make group processes a central subject of social psychology.

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