Muzafer Sherif - Group COnflict

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I was just wondering why Muzafer Sherif's study "Experiments in group conflict was a classic?

-- Shawna Wieler (shawnawieler@hotmail.com), September 29, 2003

Answers

Generally a study of any kind becomes a classic because (1) the findings become generally accepted so that they are essential to any review of the literature; (2) the findings are puzzling or controversial enough to inspire a number of other studies, all of which come back in some way to the original; (3) because the author proposes novel explanations that become foundational to later discussions; (4) because the author proposed an entirely new question that others then explored. For this study, the best way to understand its significance is to read the results in the context of related literature. There is a nice discussion of the study in Roger Brown's "classic" Social Psychology, and you'll find it in virtually any social psychology text, as well as many introductory texts. I suspect you'll find plenty of discussion simply by running Sherif's name on the internet.

-- Hendrika Vande Kemp (hendrika@earthlink.net), September 30, 2003.

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