Muzafer Sherif Turkish psychologist Date of Birth: 29.07.1906 Country: Turkey

Biography of Muzafer Sherif

Muzafer Sherif, a Turkish psychologist, was born as Muzafer Serif Basoglu. He grew up in a wealthy Turkish family in the suburbs of Izmir. In 1919, their home was seized by Greek forces, and many residents were killed. According to Sherif, a Greek soldier had already lowered his bayonet to kill him, but then changed his mind and left the thirteen-year-old boy alive. This incident had a profound impact on his subsequent life, as it became the theme of his research on the mechanisms of intergroup conflict.

Sherif earned his bachelor's degree from the American International College in Izmir in 1927. He then obtained a master's degree from Istanbul University in the same year. He won a national scholarship competition to study abroad and traveled to the United States, where he defended his second master's thesis at Harvard University in 1932. He chose Harvard because of the presence of William James, a renowned psychologist and philosopher. During his studies, Sherif's interests mainly focused on politics and sociology. He was actively interested in the current political events and their impact on people's perception. For example, his research during that time explored the influence of unemployment on the perception of the unemployed, who, for instance, did not know what day of the week it was because it didn't matter in their lives.

Returning to Turkey, Sherif stopped in Berlin, where he attended several lectures by Wolfgang Kohler. He noted that the situation of Hitler's rise to power provided valuable moments for researchers interested in human relationships. In 1935, he returned to the United States to defend his doctoral dissertation titled "Some Social Factors in Perception" under the supervision of Gardner Murphy at Columbia University. In 1936, he published his first book, "The Psychology of Social Norms."

One of Sherif's classic experiments, conducted in 1935, involved using the autokinetic effect. In a completely dark room, a pinpoint light source was placed at a distance of 5 meters from the participants to create an illusion of movement. The instruction to the participants was to press a telegraph key when they noticed the movement and indicate the distance the light source had moved after it disappeared. In one group, the experimenter first conducted the experiment with the group as a whole, and then individually with each participant, while in another group, the procedure was reversed. The experiment demonstrated how group discussion influenced individual judgments expressed later.

After defending his dissertation, Sherif returned to Ankara, where he translated major psychology books into Turkish with the help of his students. He did not hide his opposition to the Nazi movement, which led to his imprisonment. However, he was released after four months thanks to the actions of American diplomats, initiated by Sherif's American colleagues. In 1944, he permanently moved to the United States.