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Anasayfa
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Muzafer Sherif: The
interconnection of politics and profession.
Ersin Asliturki
and Frances Cherryii
Department of
Psychology
Carleton University, Ottawa
Muzafer Sherif has been considered one of the
pioneering social psychologists of the last century (Billig,
1976; Cherry, 1995;Granberg
& Sarup, 1992). He had a long and productive career
spanning five decades and is remembered for numerous studies that have
become classics of social psychology. His dissertation research on the
development of norms (Sherif, 1936) and his
subsequent studies of inter-group conflict in the late 1940’s and early
1950’s (Sherif & Sherif, 1953) have left the field with a variety of concepts of continuing
importance. However, little is reported in North American social psychology
about the political philosophy and practices that informed this research.
For that understanding, one needs to know more about Sherif’s
early life in Turkey and his subsequent academic career in the United States. This paper attempts to link his professional
work to his political life and in so doing, provide a more complete
understanding of social psychology’s diverse origins in the period of 1929
to 1949 is available.
Sherif’s life and work between 1929 and 1949iii
Muzaffer Þerif Baþoðlu was born in Izmir, Turkey, in
1906. His family was a well-to-do, Muslim family, located in Western Anatolia within
the borders of the Ottoman Empire. Contrary to his family’s religious orientation, Sherif attended a Christian school managed by
missionaries. The region where he was raised witnessed the First World War
during 1914-1918 and the invasion by European countries. This was followed
by the Turkish War of Independence during 1919 and 1922. The country was
full of ethnic and religious conflicts, especially among Turks, Greeks and
Armenians. In remembering these years later, Sherif
wrote, “I was profoundly affected as a young boy when I witnessed the
serious business of transaction between human groups.” (Sherif,
1967, p.9)
Sherif goes on
to describe the processes of in-group loyalty and out-group destructiveness
that were to preoccupy him for many years, and then concluded, “at that
early age, I decided to devote my life to studying and understanding the
causes of these things. Of course for some years I did not know how to go
about it, but I started reading whatever I could lay my hands on about
history and social problems.” (p.9)
Sherif
finished his Master’s Degree in 1928 at Istanbul University.
Recollecting once again, he wrote, “by the time I came to the United States for graduate study, I had firmly decided that my life’s work would
be social psychology” (p.9). He did, in fact move to Harvard University in 1929
where he studied psychology; Edwin G. Boring and Robert Woodworth were the
scholars with whom he studied; but he preferred to read more widely in
sociology, anthropology, political science, economics and history. The most
important figure for Sherif at Harvard at that
time was probably the young and increasingly prominent Gordon Allport who was creating a science of personality
psychology (Granberg & Sarup,
1992; Nicholson, 2002).
After graduating from Harvard in 1932 with a second Master’s degree,
Sherif travelled in Europe on return to Turkey. He attended courses with Wolfgang Kohler
in Germany and was witness to the impact of the Great Depression and the rise
of Nazism in that country. Sherif returned to the
psychology program at Harvard in 1933 but continued to be more interested
in social processes than the growing science of personality. Consequently,
he left Harvard and moved to New
York to Columbia University where
he was welcomed by Gardner Murphy. With Murphy, Sherif
had a more comfortable academic life because his views were compatible with
Murphy’s more leftist social philosophy. Sherif
wrote his doctoral thesis, Some
Social Factors In Perception and
with Murphy's support it was published as the Psychology of Social Norms. In Pandora’s (1997) book, Rebels Within the Ranks, Murphy spoke of Sherif’s
dissertation as “enlightened experimentalism” because it used the
laboratory to focus on the social context for research participants rather
studying them in isolation from one another. The laboratory was a way to
bring the outside social world inside the Academy.
For Sherif, Columbia offered
a way to approach experimentation that was inherently “social” and that was
true to both the Marxist and the Gestalt influences that were predominant
in his development as a social psychologist. Both Gestalt and Marxist ideas
continued to influence Sherif’s research after
his dissertation was completed. He returned to Turkey after
his dissertation in 1936, and conducted studies with urban adolescents and
with villagers, along the line of his earlier works on social perception. Sherif also worked for Public Houses in Turkey, a
government institution in which progressive intellectuals were challenging
religious beliefs and were educating people for a modern Turkey. He
gave academically and politically oriented seminars and colloquia in Turkey during
this time.
During the war Sherif published critiques
of race psychology in his book, Race
psychology, (1944) based mainly on other
critical works such as Klineberg’s Race Differences and Huxley and
Haddon's We Europeans. One of Sherif’s graduate students in Turkey, Fatma Basaran (Balkaya, 1995) confirmed that Sherif
was politically very active along the line of his anti-fascist attitudes.
Other than publishing articles, he was writing for newspapers and political
journals and organizing meetings. One of the main themes in his writings
was, not surprisingly, criticism of Turkism (Balkaya,
1995). His book, The Changing World,
a collection of his newspaper articles written with a Marxist scholar Behice Boran was published in
Ankara (Sherif, 1945).
In 1944, when his anti-nazism became
intolerable to the Turkish government, that was ideologically supporting
Nazism at this period, he was arrested for four
months by the Turkish government. Given the support of American colleagues
and Harvard alumni (Hadley Cantril, Leonard Doob, Gardner Murphy, Gordon Allport) and the U.S. Department of State, he was
released from prison and assisted with returning to the United States. When Sherif returned to the U.S. in late
1944, he collaborated with Hadley Cantril at Princeton and published The Psychology of Ego Involvements in 1947. This book can be viewed
as the most explicitly socialist book by Muzafer Sherif in terms of its orientation towards core Marxist
concepts such as historical-dialectical materialism and mode of production.
Sherif had planned to return to Turkey.
However, he learned that Turkish administrators did not approve of his
return with his wife, Carolyn Sherif, whom he had
recently married. It was with the support of two colleagues that Sherif moved to the University of Oklahoma in 1949
where he would stay until 1966 (Granberg & Sarup, 1992).
Gestaltist and Marxist ideas in Sherif’s
early writings
In the period during which Sherif started
his masters and finished his Ph.D., that is, between 1929 and 1936, Gestalt
psychology was newly entering North
America and integrating into American
psychology up until the end of the Second World War (Ash, 1985; Sokal, 1984). During this period Wolfgang Kohler wrote Gestalt Psychology (1929) and, with Koffka (1935) gave seminars and colloquia in different
universities including Harvard. Most likely, Sherif
joined these seminars although there is no direct evidence of this. There
is evidence that he was a part of regular meetings at the New York home of
Gestalt psychology founder, Max Wertheimer, who was closely associated with
Marxists from the Frankfurt School (Ash, 1985; Granberg & Sarup, 1992). Various Gestalt and Marxist strands of
thinking surrounded Sherif. Wertheimer's
meetings included Solomon Asch, Abraham Maslow and Erich Fromm.
Additionally, Sherif had already been introduced
to Kurt Lewin at Harvard, translated some of Lewin’s work into Turkish and sometimes grounded his
own thinking in Lewin’s work.
The influence of both Gestalt and Marxist ideas find their place in Sherif’s dissertation research on norm formation and
his concept of frame of reference.
In that work, he captures the essence of Gestalt psychology stating that
“the position of an object is perceived in its relation to the whole organized
field” (Sherif, 1936, p.37). In Psychology of Social Norms based on
his dissertation, Sherif directly talks about
Gestalt psychology in only three places. However, from beginning to the
end, the book has numerous arguments on the relativity of different
cultures, frame of reference, different contexts of behaviour, the anchoring value of social constructions, figure-ground
relationships, among others. All of these concepts are to some extent
related to Gestalt psychology.
For Sherif, different cultures are akin to
different frames of reference and given his life between two cultures, it
is not surprising that his work was so informed by Gestaltist
ideas. In fact, Sherif refers to the literature
from cultural anthropology and ethnology to demonstrate different examples
of frames of references and how
attitudes and behaviours earn their social meaning in their cultural
context. In Turkey, Sherif did studies that emphasized
culture as frame of reference. In five different Turkish Villages (first
detailed in Sherif, 1948), he showed that
different levels of contact with technology and modernism lead to the
creation of different units of distance, space, time, richness, which
correspond to different frames of
references.
The concept of frame of reference, selectivity of perception,
structured and unstructured stimulus conditions are also widely used and
discussed in The Psychology of
Ego-Involvements, published with Hadley Cantril
in 1947. In this book, their
definition and approach to ego
can be seen to be affected by the definitions of Koffka,
in his Principals of Gestalt
Psychology. Sherif and Cantril
ultimately define ego as a complex, dynamic structure that can change in
different situations. They base their view of attitudes also on the concept
of frame of reference. According
to their point of view, ego-attitudes which are mainly formed in group
situations and through reference groups provide individuals their frames of
reference.
Throughout the period 1929-1949, Gestaltism
for Sherif meant that his idea of social
psychology was non-reductionistic, more oriented
to the culture and group than the individual, and much more contextual and
social than the individualistic North American social psychology that was
developing in parallel. Even though it is not easy to say that Gestalt
psychology is inherently a political psychology, some Gestalt psychologists
were explicitly Marxist.
Although Sherif was
considerably affected by Marxism and political sociology, this tendency has
neither been recognized in the social psychological literature nor by the
history of social psychology. Farr (1996) and Manicas
(1987) in their writings separate Lewin, Asch and Sherif from more
mainstream social psychologists, however, they do
not go into the historical details of Sherif’s
politics. As has already been indicated, Sherif
was involved in Marxist political circles in Turkey;
however, once in the United
States, this
orientation found its way, not into a political affiliation but into his
intellectual work. For example, he stated in Psychology of Social Norms
that the social psychologies of E. A. Ross and Floyd Allport
were examples of “the pictures of men shaped in competitive individualistic
bourgeois society” (p.144) and cooperative societies were to be considered.
On the
matter of social class, Sherif wrote in the Psychology of Social Norms:
“At the present, the peoples of many countries are members of more or less
sharply defined social classes, the chief of which are the employing class
and the working class. From this situation there have naturally arisen
different norms of work and enjoyment associated with different standards
of living of opposing social classes, even within the same country. These
differences in the ways in which opposing classes regulate their lives
inevitably bring about intense friction. This indicates that in order to
eliminate such basic differences in the norms regulating the lives of human
beings, the classes themselves must be eliminated” (p. 201).
Sherif’s Marxist expressions are also evident in his
Turkish books Race Psychology (1943) and Changing World (1945), mentioned earlier. Given the basic
political nature of race psychology, Sherif was
very critical of claimed race differences in terms of intelligence and some
other psychological constructs such as personality. Sherif
also argued that claimed racial differences and fascism favoured elite
parts of society. In that sense, imperialism and fascism fed each other and
stabilized inequality and social class differences. He was also arguing that racism and
religious fundamentalism were co-operating as dark forces. Actually,
at that time, Turkey was a newly modernizing country which was sensitive to Western
modernization within a national identity construction. However, it should
be noted that Sherif was in disagreement on the
idea that nationalism could consolidate the country through notions of the
superiority of Turkishness (Deringil
1989; Landau, 1995).
In the Changing World (1945),
Sherif took a position against capitalism and
religion within his Marxist framework. The name of the book reflects Sherif’s idea about the inevitability of social change
that is driven by societal forces dialectically. Sherif
didn’t hesitate to use Marxist concepts in these short pieces of writings,
expressing the view that intellectuals play an important role in societal
progress. For example, he argued that bourgeois ideology, elitism and
totalitarianism have to be overcome to make the progression continuous. Sherif also defended an ideology of enlightenment and
cumulative heritage of all the world’s civilizations. Having an interest in
children and adolescent psychology, he made also progressive suggestions
for developmental and educational psychologies, attacking individualistic
education. He also defended the view that social structures that consist of
social class differences cannot provide a sense of security to people, so
these should be eliminated.
In the book published in 1947, The
Psychology of Ego-Involvements, Sherif, with Cantril, presented his sympathy for Marxism more
explicitly than Psychology of Social
Norms. For example, they discuss Erich Fromm’s
approach to psychoanalysis that puts emphasis on the historical materialism
of Marx and Engels for a more social
psychoanalysis. In that book, one can find also an appreciation of the
Soviet political and societal system in comparison with the American
political system. It must be remembered that this is prior to the
recognition of the Stalinist regime.
In The Psychology of
Ego-Involvements, Makarenko’s school study of
the Gorki Colony for juvenile delinquents is
described by Sherif as: “an outstanding
illustration of the emergent effects of democratically organized collective
training on individuals” (p. 338). It is also interesting that Sherif uses the status of women in the Soviet Union as an example of how
femininity and masculinity are shaped by the social system. Similarly, Sherif openly praised the situation of the workers in
the Soviet Union, saying that:
“In a
socialist organization where all means of production and exchange are owned
and operated by the state, the possibility exists for each worker, no
matter what his job, to identify himself with purposes and aspirations of
the whole society”(p. 375).
It is well known that communism was appealing to academics from the
late thirties to the late forties (Schrecker,
1986). Schrecker’s analyses of “academic communists” in her book, No Ivory Tower, argues that
communism was offering a framework, and an intellectual system or an
ideology explaining the social and political chaos of the Great Depression,
the rise of fascism and anti-Semitism and World War Two (p. 31). Although,
not all academic communists were affiliated with the Communist Party in the
United Sates, there was a decided sympathy for communism. During these
years it was legitimate to be an academic communist since “the leading anti-fascist organization in the world” was the Soviet Communist Party according to Schrecker (p. 36). She notes that Soviets supported the
Popular Front in The Spanish Civil War and then, in The Second World War,
they fought against Nazism and racism.
One of the interesting questions that must be posed is why Sherif, in the period of 1949 to the end of his career,
showed less interest in Gestaltism and Marxism. Sherif’s work on super-ordinate goals was based on
“groups” rather than social classes explicitly. Sherif’s
writings about his studies on inter-group conflict and co-operation were
less explicitly embedded in the political and historical context in terms
of theoretical construction and expressions (Billig, 1976; Cherry, 1995). It is clear in the
book in 1966, In Common Predicament,
that Sherif still supported a Marxist-progressive
framework but in terms of its expression, it is very
muted. His social criticism and class-based analyses were considerably
diminished and replaced with group-based analyses. In this period, he
actively worked with political scientists (Sherif,
& Koslin 1960) and his collaboration brought
his work more into the liberal mainstream.
It may be that the pressures of 1950s McCarthyism (e.g., Schrecker, 1986; Smith, 1986) and American liberal progressive politics shifted his
political stance from his earlier Marxist framework. The climate at the University of Oklahoma (Cross, 1981) was also affected by McCarthyism. Sherif
remained a foreign national and there was concern about whether he would be
allowed to stay in the country as such and whether he could sign a loyalty
oath. He did sign, in 1951, and remained at the University of Oklahoma, although there appears to have been difficulties with the
Immigration Services. By this point, he was very well known and, according
to the archival record, the University of Oklahoma did everything possible to retain him (Levy, 2003, personal
communication).
It is difficult to say what direction his work might have taken had
the anti-communism of the Cold War period not been so restricting. In our judgment, the argument can be made that Sherif is best understood as a forerunner to political
and critical social psychology and perhaps to a more newly emerging
cultural psychology that takes into account variety and differences between
cultures. Frame of reference and context from Gestalt psychology as well as
dialectical notions of Marxism were stressed throughout his early work. A
closer examination of Sherif shows us a history
of social psychology somewhat different than what is currently mainstream.
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Endnotes
Parts
of this paper were given by Ersin Asliturk at the annual meeting of the History and
Philosophy of Psychology Section of the Canadian Psychological Association,
June XX, 2003, Hamilton, Ontario.
i Ersin Asliturk is a doctoral
student at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. He received his B.A. from
the Army Academy and his M.A. from
the Middle East Technical University, both of which are
in Ankara, Turkey. He is currently
working with Professor Chris Davis on terror management theory and trauma.
He is also interested in cross-cultural psychology and personality theory.
ii Fran Cherry is a professor at Carleton University and is interested in social
psychology at mid-20th century. She is working on a history of
action research and its investigative practices in New York (1945-1965).
iii This paper is based on the first author’s
reading or Sherif’s originals Turkish writings
which are not widely available but were obtained from the library of the Institution of Turkish History.
Available published materials in both Turkish and English were used as well
as a conversation and interview with a former graduate student (Fatma Basaran) of Sherif's who now resides in Turkey
Asliturk, E., & Cherry, F. (2004). Muzafer
Sherif: The interconnection of politics and
profession. History and Philosophy of Psychology Bulletein.
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