42 Facts About Carolyn Sherif

Carolyn Wood Sherif was an American social psychologist who helped to develop social judgment theory and contributed pioneering research in the areas of the self-system, group conflict, cooperation, and gender identity.

Carolyn Sherif assumed a leading role in psychology both nationally as well as internationally.

Carolyn Sherif was born Carolyn Wood on 26 June 1922, the youngest of three children of Bonny Williams and Lawrence Anselm Wood, in Loogootee, Indiana.

Wood Carolyn Sherif graduated from West Lafayette High School in 1940.

Wood Carolyn Sherif earned a Bachelor of Science from Purdue University in 1943 with the highest distinction in an experimental program developed for women science majors that focused on studying the sciences within humanist and historical perspectives.

Carolyn Sherif received encouragement from a professor to pursue these questions through research in the field of social psychology.

In 1944, following the completion of her master's, Wood Carolyn Sherif went to work as a psychology researcher for Audience Research Inc.

Carolyn Sherif decided instead to return to graduate studies, and applied for a research assistant position with Muzafer Sherif at Princeton University, which initiated their career-long professional collaboration.

However, Carolyn Sherif had decided that she wanted to have a marriage of equals where her career ambitions would be supported.

Carolyn Sherif characterizes this as a desire based on fictional portrayals and not reflected in the reality of any of the relationships she observed.

When she met Sherif, Carolyn Wood felt that she had found a way to achieve her dream.

Muzafer Carolyn Sherif was an outspoken believer in equal rights for women and fully supported Wood Carolyn Sherif's goal of realizing a successful research career.

However, because Princeton did not accept women as graduate students until 1961, Wood Carolyn Sherif commuted to Columbia University for classes for graduate education.

Wood Carolyn Sherif actively engaged in conducting research and writing books with Carolyn Sherif during this period, but she was frequently denied appropriate credit for her work because she did not have a PhD or a position at any university.

In 1961, Wood Carolyn Sherif completed her PhD under Wayne Holtzman at this university.

Carolyn Sherif's dissertation culminated in the published paper "Social Categorization as a function of Latitude of Acceptance and Series Range", which assessed the different ranges of positions on a topic that different individuals found acceptable, examined how an individual's range of acceptability changed depending on the range of the stimuli being labeled as acceptable or not, and how these two factors in turn affected the behavior of social categorization.

Wood Carolyn Sherif is first author on the final of these books published in 1965, Attitude and Attitude Change: The Social Judgement-Involvement Approach, which presented the social judgment theory of persuasion.

Wood Carolyn Sherif subsequently had visiting professor positions at Cornell University and Smith College, but she remained a professor at Pennsylvania State University until her death in 1982.

Wood Carolyn Sherif devoted herself to teaching, creating both undergraduate and graduate courses at Pennsylvania State University to address issues in social psychology.

Wood Carolyn Sherif contributed to many areas of social psychology through her own broad research interests and her encouragement to her students to study whatever topics they found most compelling, instead of solely the topics on which she had already performed research.

Wood Carolyn Sherif later translated her expertise in group formation and competition to the emerging field of sports psychology.

Carolyn Sherif noted that the social environment could significantly affect the level of motivation an individual would have to perform in a given competitive process.

Wood Carolyn Sherif outlined a seminal theory of attitude change in Attitude and Attitude Change.

Carolyn Sherif argued that audiences judge persuasive messages by the degree to which the messages agree or disagree with their own attitudes.

Furthermore, Wood Carolyn Sherif argued that as individuals develop these organized attitudes towards the social world, their self-system alters their perception of other people's attitudes, so that similarities and differences to others' attitudes are exaggerated for an individual.

Wood Carolyn Sherif was an active member in the APA, in division 35 which was dedicated to the Psychology of Women.

Carolyn Sherif was the program chair for the 1978 APA program and the division President from 1979 to 1980.

Carolyn Sherif made numerous contributions in this time through her published research articles on a variety of women's topics including: gender bias in research, gender identity, gender role, reproduction and sociology.

Wood Carolyn Sherif applied her concept of the self-system in pioneering research on gender identity that culminated in the publication of her other best-known book, Orientation in Social Psychology, in 1976, and her presidential address to the American Psychological Association as the head of that division in 1980.

Carolyn Sherif argues that research on gender identity needs to account for the fact that individuals are aware of the gender categories within their culture and maintain a psychological relationship with this categorization; that is, their self-systems are influenced by this aspect of the social environment.

Carolyn Sherif further argued for the use of the self-system concept in gender identity studies instead of simply relying on a single self-report question.

Therefore, Wood Carolyn Sherif argued that understanding an individual's reference groups, the important elements of their social environment that are a part of that person's self-system, would be crucial to understanding that person's complex gender identity and explaining their attitudes.

Carolyn Sherif argued that accounting for the complexities in gender identity using this self-system approach could help explain the seemingly contradictory results obtained from studies using simple self-report measures or those that focused only on single attitudes.

Carolyn Sherif argued that individuals could prefer their own category without necessarily holding negative attitudes towards those in another category if both groups are considered equal and must work interdependently to achieve goals.

Carolyn Sherif emphasized that it is not the degree of difference or similarity between two groups that leads to negative outgroup attitudes like gender stereotyping, but instead this nature of the relationship between the two groups.

Carolyn Sherif suggested that negative stereotyping of the female gender therefore occurred because of the power differential in this relationship between males and females in American society.

Carolyn Sherif then argued that attitude and persuasion researchers should instead consider differences in "social status," which she defined as the combination of social power and social position.

Carolyn Sherif stated that the social status of a poor, black woman was very different from the social status of a wealthy, white woman, which in turn was very different from a wealthy white man.

Only after understanding this social status differential with respect to these different levels did Wood Carolyn Sherif believe scientists could then understand differences in social persuasion strategies between groups.

Wood Carolyn Sherif received many awards and distinctions for her work.

Carolyn Sherif received an award for her contributions to psychology education in 1982.

Carolyn Sherif was appointed the editor of the Journal of Social Issues as well, but due to her sudden death in July 1982, she was not able to receive this honor.