The Lost Boys

by Gina Perry

In Turkey in 1930, a protest against the government had made national news when an armed crowd protested against the secularisation of the state and called for the restoration of religious law. A policeman fired on the crowd, triggering a riot, and the crowd turned on the police and beheaded the commanding officer. It wasn’t the first rebellion against the government, but it was the most shocking, because it took place not in a remote region, where people had limited access to education and religion had a much firmer grip, but in Menemen, close to the city of Izmir and the heartland of Kemalism. It was a watershed moment. The government realised it had to change tactics — instead of imposing change by force, it needed new methods for convincing and educating people on the value of accepting Kemalist ideology, and one of the most powerful tools was the education system. When he returned to Turkey, Sherif was employed at a teacher training college where he taught new teachers educational methods drawing on proven techniques in social psychology for fostering and shaping desirable attitudes that would inculcate young citizens and persuade older ones of the value and benefits of Republican ideals. In the year he worked there, Sherif developed an experiment about persuading individuals to change their perceptions.

  As soon as he was back at Harvard in 1933, Sherif excitedly presented it to Allport. Early astronomers had noticed how if you looked at a single star against a very dark night sky, it appeared to move. They called this the autokinetic effect. Sherif used it in an experiment to show how you could change people’s perception of facts. First, he seated a man in a completely dark room and asked him to estimate how far the single point of light moved in the darkness. Even though the light wasn’t actually moving, each man thought that it was and estimated how far. But when one man was joined by a group of others and they gave their estimates out loud, the man’s judgement converged with the group’s. If he estimated the movement as, say, 6 inches on his own, he began to estimate it as more like 4 inches, increasing or decreasing his estimates in line with the rest. Without being aware of it, people changed their way of seeing things to more closely resemble the views of others in their group. The influence of the group was a powerful force in changing people’s attitudes.

  But people weren’t aware of this process, Sherif argued to Allport. Our judgement, our perception of what’s true and what’s not, what to hold onto and what to reject, is shaped by people we identify with, our tribe. This explains how people absorbed positive and negative beliefs and racist attitudes, and why they hold on to outdated ideas. People unconsciously look to their tribe, or main identity group, for guidance, and are even more susceptible in times of uncertainty and change.

  Allport didn’t buy it. He disagreed with the premise that people’s behaviour was shaped primarily by their membership of groups. For him, the individual’s personality and personal experiences were key. To overcome a social problem such as racial prejudice, you looked to character building and introspection for answers.

  Yet Sherif was impatient with and increasingly dismissive of the individualistic emphasis of North American social psychology. Psychology that was relevant and pertinent to building a new nation had to concern itself not with individual introspection but with understanding how citizens embraced the often faulty thinking and attitudes of those around them. The only true social psychology was one that studied people in groups.

  Disheartened by Allport’s reaction, Sherif quit Harvard soon afterwards, leaving for Columbia University.

  Despite their intellectual falling out, Allport wrote a letter to Columbia introducing his former student, describing Sherif’s work as ‘unusually original’ and Sherif as ‘highly ambitious’, with a complete ‘new framework for social psychology’ in mind. But in another letter to a friend in Turkey, Allport wrote glumly, ‘I do hope he leaves his temperament behind him when he enters Columbia.’

  Sherif loved New York. ‘The whole world is here!’ his daughter Joan remembers him saying. He revelled in its cosmopolitan character and multicultural mix, and walked the streets for hours each day.

  He moved into a six-storey apartment block at 740 Riverside Drive in Harlem in April 1934. But he had no money and no obvious way of paying the rent in Apartment 3C. For a while, his new supervisor, Gardner Murphy, helped him out financially, even though Murphy could ill afford it. Yet once again Sherif was rescued, this time by the American Friends of Turkey, a charity dedicated to helping to rebuild and redevelop the country after the war of independence, whose founder, Asa Jennings, thought Sherif’s work was brilliant. ‘Sherif … was over to our apartment for dinner a few nights ago. We had a very splendid evening’s visit with him. He has made a marvellous record over here and there is no doubt that he will go far. I am very anxious to see his book: it is evidently quite remarkable.’

  The book was The Psychology of Social Norms, which Sherif began writing soon after he arrived with the help of his new sweetheart, Mary Alice Eaton, a student at Wellesley College who he met at Harvard. Sherif could be charming and was attractive to women, but they had to be prepared to put up with his work ethic. For a while he considered marrying Mary Alice, but decided against it because marriage ‘might interfere with my developing work’.

  Sherif’s move to New York had been impulsive, kind of crazy. He’d lost his Harvard scholarship. It was the middle of the Depression, and he had little means of supporting himself. But in a way, it was the perfect environment for the research that he had planned for his PhD. The darkened room at Columbia, with its supposedly moving pinpoint of light, echoed the ambiguous and shifting landscape of social change on the streets outside. Sherif argued that his autokinetic experiment demonstrated how in periods of crisis — when the usual boundaries are blurred or unclear, and people feel uncertain — members of a group are more likely to be influenced by and accept the perceptions of others. It might not sound like much of a trailblazing experiment, but it made a splash. It seemed to offer tangible evidence of how social norms arise and are kept alive, as well as sounding a warning about the human tendency to be shaped and moulded by those around us, especially in periods of rapid social change.

  And he had evidence of that right on his doorstep. Harlem was a magnet for intellectuals and artists, farm workers and labourers, where black Americans were finding a new voice and demanding greater racial equality. On streets and in churches and clubs and houses across Harlem, African Americans were forging a new cultural identity, spurred by the black soldiers returning from the war. A new generation were rejecting cultural stereotypes and envisioning a new future.

  ‘Father Divine is Dean of the Universe.’ The silver letters swayed from a line across the ceiling in the hall in Harlem. In the packed benches below, hundreds of people sang fervently, accompanied by a brass band:

  Father Divine is the captain,

  Coming around the bend,

  And the steering wheel’s in his hand …

  The hall was hot, and handkerchiefs fluttered as people in the crowd mopped their faces. A large, middle-aged woman with a hat perched sideways stood and told the audience she’d suffered terrible pain and misery from her bad knee — no doctor could help her. But then she met Father Divine and he miraculously cured her. Some people listened quietly; others closed their eyes and moaned. Some shouted, ‘We thank you, Father!’ and ‘Isn’t he wonderful?’

  The band started up again, and the woman led the next hymn, with people clapping and calling the praises of Father Divine. One by one, a continuous stream of people stood up to testify to his amazing power to reverse misfortune and transform lives. Downstairs, an enormous banquet was laid out, the plates continuously replenished for the constant stream of hungry disciples.

  Muzafer Sherif spent most of his Sundays in 1934 here, at Father Divine’s Revival meetings, watching, fascinated, at this proof that such a large and growing number of people could be convinced that a rather ordinary-looking man was God on earth. How and why had Father Divine managed to inspire such devotion? W
hat psychological factors were at play that bound his followers together? Disguised as a believer, Sherif mingled with the crowd, surreptitiously recording proceedings and conversations with followers.

  Sherif and fellow researcher Hadley Cantril noticed how the preacher created a self-contained world. In the realm of Father Divine, member-believers were promised not just material comfort but also pride, freedom from oppression, security, respect, belonging, racial equality, and certainty in a frightening and uncertain world. His followers traded their former individual identity for a new collective one, bound together by a common set of standards that gave them a sense of belonging.

  It was in the Church of Father Divine that Sherif too saw the light, the clearest outline yet of his emerging theory of the social psychology of groups.

  A charismatic leader inspires, protects, and gains cooperation through powerful rhetoric, but most of all by appealing to people’s need to belong.

  Sherif’s postgraduate training might have been American, but his early studies were exploring a theme that was central for the modernisation of Turkey. Sherif was never explicit about this goal, or that Atatürk and the new Republic were the drive for his developing a new social psychology. But his country was experiencing a historical moment, when people who saw themselves as Ottoman subjects, their lives governed by the rituals and traditions of religion, were required to renounce that identity in favour of citizenship of a new secular Republic. It seemed no coincidence that Sherif’s work mirrored the same question: how could they be persuaded to adopt new ways of thinking and behaving and embrace their new identity?

  As Muzafer Sherif conducted his research and made his observations of the men’s changing viewpoints on the pinpoint of light in the darkened room and of the congregation of Father Divine, he too was being shaped by forces around him.

  He roamed New York’s streets alternately inspired, appalled, thrilled, and outraged by what he saw. The country was in the grip of the Depression, and he was shocked to see the destitution and suffering, the growing number of people sleeping in parks, families camped in cardboard shelters, the lines for soup kitchens and charities stretching for blocks. Others walked the streets looking shell-shocked, or stood listening to soapbox orators urging them to join marches and protests, rallies and rent strikes. But he was exhilarated by the impassioned speeches at mass gatherings, the defiance and indignation that fuelled union membership, strikes, and protests, and the way people were organising and banding together to fight injustice at home and fascism abroad. He wrote to Gardner Murphy highlighting the irrelevance of religion at such a time:

  Last night I attended two meetings at Columbus Circle … one of the Salvation Army; the others called themselves hobo group … The speakers were attacking each other. The Salvation Army woman was preaching big words that are the heritage of centuries. The hobo speaker was pointing out six hungry men and saying, “We don’t want pie in the sky. We want to feed these hungry men (with the emphasis of his fist going down) and now!”

  But it was the communist rallies that had the biggest effect on him. One night he attended a rally of 15,000 people to protest the arrest of twenty-year-old communist and African American labour organiser Angelo Herndon, who had been sentenced to twenty years on a chain gang for ‘inciting insurrection’ among black workers in Georgia. Herndon and others recounted the legacies of slavery — the devastating effects of discrimination, segregation, and lynchings, and how the Great Depression had hit black Americans much harder than whites. In the heaving crowd, Sherif was electrified by the injustices Herndon described, and that night wrote to his supervisor that he felt outraged and embittered by what he’d heard. Sherif, like so many of his colleagues, turned to the communist party, which championed public infrastructure projects that employed unemployed people, agitated for racial equality and workers’ rights, and opposed fascism overseas and oppressive economic practices at home.

  On the streets of New York, Sherif witnessed what he saw as the cruel consequences of a capitalist society and the emergence of a collectivist identity. At soapboxes, street-corner meetings, and demonstrations, he watched the birth of new groups and saw how the disempowered became empowered, the downtrodden became defiant, the oppressed raise their voices, as a result of being part of a larger movement. By observing the speakers who, in their passionate commentary, described individual experiences that everyone in the audience could identify with, by dramatic gestures and rhetoric, they created a feeling of we-ness: a sense of equality, of shared identity that gave people solace and solidarity, and encouraged people to take action to look after one another.

  At Columbia University, Sherif found his own tribe, joining a small group of psychologists from ethnic and racial minorities who identified strongly with the issue of racial prejudice. Among his friends were African American researchers Kenneth and Mamie Clark, whose work on the psychological effects of prejudice on black children later contributed to the US Supreme Court’s ruling in the case of Brown v. Board of Education that racial segregation was unconstitutional.

  It’s ironic that the discipline that helped legitimise racism in the first two decades of the twentieth century was, two decades later, trying to dismantle its effects. By now, psychology was abandoning its efforts to prove differences in intelligence between ethnic groups to justify discrimination, to focus instead on the psychological causes of prejudice and how to overcome it. Social psychologists began to view prejudice — whether racial, national, political, economic, or class-based — as a set of harmful attitudes that led to injustice, mistreatment, feuds, bloodshed, and war.

  Sherif and his colleagues were part of a growing number of intellectuals who shifted to the political left during the Depression. They saw capitalism as perpetuating inequalities of opportunity and promoting a culture of discrimination, and dreamed of a society free from oppression, promising equality for all.

  But as Sherif soon discovered on his return to Turkey in 1937, exposure to new ideas in America had changed the way he viewed his homeland. And it would transform him into an outcast.

  In 1937, Sherif returned to Turkey to take a job at the Gazi Institute in Ankara and, two years later, transferred to the newly established Ankara University. Like the University of Istanbul, from which Sherif had graduated, the capital’s new university had been established to further the Republic’s revolutionary ideology and turn out graduates who were ardent supporters of the politics of modernisation.

  In the time he had been away in America, Ankara had developed into a modern European city, although it had little of the beauty of Istanbul. Planned, orderly, regulated, it represented Atatürk’s vision of the future and reflected the influence of the German architects who designed it. The rather sleepy town had been transformed, with roadways, wide boulevards, and public buildings in Bauhaus, Art Deco, and Cubist styles. Money and people flowed into the city — government officials, diplomats, teachers, students, businessmen, and shopkeepers. Ankara had few mosques, plenty of health centres and sports arenas, some cinemas and schools. But compared to Istanbul, there was little night-life. Underneath its modern exterior and despite being the country’s capital, Ankara was still a village. And like any small village, it was rife with spies and gossip and intrigue.

  ‘For everything in the world — for civilisation, for life, for success — the truest guide is knowledge and science.’ Atatürk’s positivist message was inscribed as a daily reminder to staff and students passing through the doors of the imposing Germanic façade of the Faculty of Languages, History, and Geography at the University of Ankara. I imagined that at first Muzafer Sherif hurried past the quotation on the wall with barely a second glance on his way into work each day. But he soon began to question exactly what kind of knowledge and science should guide the new nation.

  Sherif, like many of his peers, had regarded Atatürk as a contemporary hero, with a vision for a new Turkey as a modern democracy: a state that could
straddle both the secular and the religious, and implement the progressive reforms required to transform it into a nation equal to other modern nation-states in the world. Until his death in 1938, Atatürk kept extreme forms of nationalism under control and kept his distance from Nazi Germany. But after his death, the pro-fascists in the ruling party became more vocal and influential. Turkey’s relationship and alignment with the ideology of Nazi Germany became increasingly close. Worse, the government was looking to import a capitalist model for the economy, and was more and more framing discourse about national identity according to race.

  In America, Sherif had embraced the notion of social psychology with a conscience, that should and could document the psychological costs of oppression and inequality and help to dismantle oppressive political systems. And he’d been surrounded at Columbia by people who shared his idealism. But the Ankara faculty that he joined taught theories of hereditary racial inferiority and superiority as well as the new Turkish history, rewritten to prove the historical superiority of the Turkish ‘race’. The faculty was a microcosm of European politics, divided into those, like the German or German-trained Kemalist professors, who supported such racist theories, and those, like Sherif and his friends Behice Boran and Niyazi Berkes, who had studied in the United States and brought criticisms of racist science back with them.

  During World War II, Turkey aligned itself with whoever looked likely to win, signing friendship agreements first with France and Britain in 1939, then with Germany in 1941. The government’s attitude to its leading intellectuals flip-flopped between tolerance and persecution. Until 1941, the government was supportive of journalists, publications, and intellectuals that favoured Britain, France and their Allies.

  Sherif made no secret of his views about the war, and was ‘violently outspoken’ about his support for the Allies, and vociferous in his opposition to the axis powers. In a series of articles in left-wing journals, Sherif criticised those in Turkey who were sympathetic to the Nazi doctrine. He scoffed at supposedly scientific theories about race differences based on IQ or skull size. He called proponents of hereditary differences ‘defectives’ and labelled fascism as ignorant, feudal, and primitive, echoing the terminology the Young Turks used to describe the Ottoman Empire. Racism, Sherif argued, was incompatible with the modern, civilised Republic. He had arrived back in Turkey from America sure of his ideological high ground, and his ridiculing tone and dismissiveness infuriated his critics.