Sherif

Another prominent personality in psychology that further advanced the area was Muzafer Sherif, a Turkish-American social psychologist who made a progression in social judgment theory and conflict theory. Muzafer was born on July 29, 1905 in Muzzaffer Serif Basoglu and died on October 16, 1988 in Fairbanks, Alaska at the age of eighty-two from a heart attack (Harvey, 1989). During Sherif’s early years, he attended an elementary school for six years and enrolled at Izmir International College, where he had attended until he decided to attend Istanbul University, to study philosophy in 1924. While attending the university, Sherif became interested in hormic psychology, which influenced him to pursue a Masters degree and a PhD in the United States at Harvard. Throughout his years in graduate school, Sherif widened his interests towards other areas in social sciences by focusing more on social structuration and experimental studies, due to the influences of the Great Depression taking place at the time. Once Muzafer completed his Masters, he began planning out a theory …show more content…
The psychologist conducted an experiment/study called the Robbers Cave Experiments to test his theory about group interactions, in which he created a conflict between two groups who were competing against each other with a limited amount of resources. Muzafer found that hostility and intergroup conflicts come about when competing under a degree of restrictions, which concluded that his conflict theory was “correct” (Paper Back Swap, 2004). Sherif made it possible to understand how social process affect human behavior as well as the mind, he was able to show the relationship the two concepts had with one another and each enabled or influenced human reasoning, in addition to further understand the nature of people’s