In the US state park of Robbers Cave, Oklahoma, Carolyn Wood Sherif is standing squinting up at the sun. The two wooden cabins before her rattle with shrieks and cries from excited 11-year-old boys. They have been split into two groups of 11 and encouraged to bond.
Over three long, laborious weeks in the summer of 1954, Wood Sherif watches as these boys become enthusiastically dedicated to their allocated groups. When instructed to compete for resources, they grow hostile towards their opponents. The experiment descends into inter-group violence and aggression.
This research was among the first naturalistic psychological studies to show how group formation can lead to prejudice and intense conflict. It is considered a classic study upon which the subdiscipline of social psychology – how mind and behaviour are influenced by the presence of other people – was born. Wood Sherif should have made her academic career from it.
But in many ways, scientific research is a culture, a club. There are people with the power to warmly invite others to participate, and others who are intentionally kept out. Many female scientists have suffered because of this power imbalance.
‘A wife helping her husband’
Wood Sherif ran the Robbers Cave study with her longstanding collaborator, colleague and husband, Muzafer Sherif. Yet while he enjoyed an illustrious career, her intellectual contributions to social psychology were literally written out of the historical record.
Wood started working as Sherif’s research assistant in 1944. At the time, his department at Princeton University did not allow women to be faculty members or graduate students, but he had the power to make an exception. They married a year later.
The pair collaborated extensively for over a decade. Wood Sherif was often the driving force behind their research, yet her scientific writing was often attributed solely to her husband. Wood Sherif’s name was removed from academic papers when they were circulated. “I was seen as a wife helping her husband,” she later recalled.
After her husband was awarded the American Psychological Association’s Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award in 1968, Wood Sherif began to realise that social psychology might never welcome her in the same way. She joined the American women’s movement, a national campaign for legal, social and political gender equality. This connected her with more women in her discipline who were having similar frustrated experiences. Finally, Wood Sherif found a welcoming academic home.
She turned her focus sharply to identifying and exposing the presence of bias in psychology. Her core thesis was that it was flawed because most research was based on men’s experiences and treated male behaviour as the “normal” standard, leading to distorted and damaging views of women.
This series is dedicated to lesser-known, highly influential scientists who have had a powerful influence on the careers and research paths of many others, including the authors of these articles.
In 1979, Wood Sherif wrote my favourite psychological paper of all time. The paper, titled Bias in Psychology, offered a demolition job of psychological science over 16 glorious pages.
She warned that psychologists had gone awry by attempting to mimic the methodologies of the “hard sciences”, such as physics and chemistry, without first considering how these standards did not naturally apply to the scientific study of human beings in context.
Wood Sherif argued that people should be studied within their social context. She criticised psychologists for reducing complex human experiences into compartmentalised units that might have been easier to study, but were disconnected from real life.
She explicitly rejected the discipline’s reliance on experimental methods. Rather, she implored her peers to embrace the messy human aspects of their work in order for it to be useful, writing:
What goes on in our laboratories, clinics and classrooms must be seen for what it is: cultural phenomena and events where we can learn about individuals, provided we understand the times and the larger societies of which they are parts.
Wood Sherif set the agenda for a new, critical subdiscipline: feminist psychology. This includes analyses of how gender shapes both our experiences as people and the work we do as psychologists. Longstanding male bias in psychology has served as its manifesto.
As she pivoted away from social psychology, Wood Sherif’s work became funny, personal and prophetic. In their 1998 reappraisal of her seminal 1979 paper, psychologists Rhoda Unger and Arnold Kahn noted how her writing “provokes and excites as well as amuses”.
Sadly, this writing was also largely ignored. Cited predominately by feminist scholars, it never gained the discipline-wide impact it deserved.
The story of Wood Sherif, and psychology’s longstanding rejection of her work, has had a powerful impact on me. She helped me understand that we cannot evaluate the state of our science without first evaluating who is welcome within it. This is the crux of my own research, which I categorise as “feminist metascience”.
The garden of forking paths
Wood Sherif died in 1982 aged 60, but her ideas are arguably more relevant now than ever. Following widespread concerns about the replicability of psychological research in the 2010s, many psychologists are realising their research may be less objective than was previously believed.
Issues such as confirmation bias and the “garden of forking paths” (the many flexible decisions researchers make during analysis that can produce misleading results) are receiving widespread attention.
But while psychology is now in an era of science reform, there are two parallel conversations going on – by those who continue to insist upon reproducibility to strengthen psychological research, and those trying to reform the science as communal, compassionate and open to issues of bias.
The latter approach has been championed by a new generation of women in the discipline. They are forced to repeat the same critiques Wood Sherif made decades ago, because her warnings about bias and objectivity were not heeded.
There are, of course, many other examples of women’s contributions being written out of the scientific record. As I document in my new book Absent Minds: The Untold Story of the Women who Changed Psychology Forever, women have time and again been relegated to supporting roles as wives, secretaries or assistants of scientists, rather than scholars in their own right.
There is one, simple, enduring lesson that stories like Wood Sherif’s tell us: listen to women.
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