Muzafer Sherif
Turkish psychologist (1906–1988)
Muzafer Sherif (born Muzaffer Şerif Başoğlu; July 29, 1906 – October 16, 1988) was a Turkish-American social psychologist. He helped develop social judgment theory and realistic conflict theory.
Sherif was a founder of modern social psychology who developed several unique and powerful techniques for understanding social processes, particularly social norms and social conflict. Many of his original contributions to social psychology have been absorbed into the field so fully that his role in the development and discovery has disappeared. Other reformulations of social psychology have taken his contributions for granted, and re-presented his ideas as new.
Life and career
Early life, education and political involvement
Muzafer Sherif was born as Muzaffer Şerif Başoğlu and grew up in a wealthy family that included five children, of whom he was the second born. He attended Elementary School in Ödemiş for six years and then attended Izmir International College from which he received a Bachelor of Arts in 1926. Sherif then obtained MA degree from the Istanbul University in 1928, where he also expressed his support for the modernization of Turkey during political debates and gathered interest in goal-oriented behaviour, or hormic psychology as proposed by British psychologist William McDougall.
Sherif grew up through the Italo-Turkish War, the Balkan Wars, World War I. Additionally, Izmir underwent occupation by Greek and Turkish soldiers from 1918 to 1924 in the Turkish War of Independence while he attended the college.
Sherif went to America during the peak of the Great Depression, earning an MA from Harvard University where his teachers were Gordon Allport and Caroll Pratt.
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This entry incorporates text from “Muzafer Sherif” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.