That individuals may react differently to the same stimulus situations has become a truism in psychology. There are cases in which such internal factors as drive, attitude, affect, or emotional upset play the dominating part in determining the experiences and subsequent behavior. The concern of this study in social paychology is to note some social factors participating in the production of such differential response on the part of individuals. Social psychology has studied individual differences in response to a social environment, but it has never recognized that each one of us perceives this environment in terms of his own personal habits of perceiving; and that cultural groups may differ from one another in behavior, because of fundamental differences in their ways of perceiving social situations. In the following paragraphs some cases reported by cultural anthropologists, revealing such differential group effects, will be reviewed. The psychological problem which they raise is the starting point for the experiments reported in this paper.
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A study of some social factors in perception
Muzafer Sherif was a Turkish-American social psychologist who helped develop social judgment theory and realistic conflict theory. This is his PhD thesis. In chapter 3, he reports the famous autokinetic movement experiments.