Muzafer & Carolyn Sherif

Muzafer and Carolyn Sherif were a pair of researchers, social psychologists, activists and a married couple, living in the 20th century. Products of their era, their ideas dealt with the impact of group norms on thoughts, ideas and behaviors. They were also extremely influential in the early field of psychology. The ideas they developed helped shape the way we think about and evaluate rhetoric in the modern world.

Muzafer Sherif was born in the Ottoman Empire in 1905 and would go on to witness many historical events that would impact the formulation of his ideas. He saw war and ethnic conflict all around him early in life. He was in close proximity to the Libyan war, the Balkan wars, the Armenian genocide, and the first World War. After graduating from International College in 1924 he moved to the United States to pursue his MA and PhD at Harvard. Studying in the U.S. during the Great Depression, his research focused on the societal underpinnings of perception and his political leanings shifted towards Marxism. He returned to Turkey and Europe during the 1940s, witnessing the rise of fascism and Nazism. He was then exiled from his home country of Turkey for speaking out against this Fascism. Now back in the U.S., he married Carolyn Sherif and continued his research.

Carolyn Sherif was born in Indiana in 1922. She was active in pursuing an education from a young age and her family was fairly supportive for the time. She graduated from Purdue University in 1945, focusing on a historical study of science. Carolyn then began work on a master’s program at the University of Iowa where she studied psychology and the work of Muzafer. She then started working as a researcher alongside Muzafer. While she strived to work with him at Princeton, she was rejected on the basis of her gender and began work on her doctorate at Columbia. Carolyn and Muzafer were married in 1945; they continued researching and developing theories together. Carolyn heavily contributed to Muzafer’s work and was not credited for it until many years later when she helped promote greater acceptance of women in psychology.

The Sherif’s work was directed at understanding society’s impact on behavior and thought; the context of societal impact on rhetoric cannot be ignored. Their work was foundational in carving out the field of social psychology as a unique discipline. Their many famous studies, such as "The Robber’s Cave Experiment" and "Attitude and Attitude Change," showed that the rhetoric we espouse, the beliefs that we hold, and the actions we take, exist within the context of group identification. This research not only shapes the landscape of psychology today, but the rhetorical tools they developed are also used by politicians, marketers and communication scholars to understand and shift attitudes.