My social psychology colleagues will be more surprised to learn of still another big investment of mine in “experiential pseudo-objectivity.” Sherif (1936, 35–42) calls attention to the old psychophysical method of “absolute judgments,” in which contrast illusions were produced by shifting the range of stimuli presented, and how a persistently changed range eventually changed the “frame of reference” or “anchors” upon which the perceptual judgments were based. Helson’s (1947, 1964) great volume of work on “adaption level” phenomena acknowledged, in his very first article, inspiration from Sherif’s concept of “frame of reference,” and also employed the method of absolute judgment. So, too, did Sherif’s later work on assimilation and contrast in social judgment (e.g., Sherif and Hovland 1961). I was sure that the contrast illusions regularly found for all types of stimulus materials (from length of lines and lifted weights to seriousness of crimes and judgments of insanity) were genuinely illusory, that is, that the perceivers were unaware that their perceptual processes had been influenced by recent stimulus context. But in the so-called method of absolute judgments, response terms such as “heavy” and “light,” or “short” and “tall,” “hot” or “cold,” or “pleasant” and “unpleasant” were employed, often translated into a 9-point restricted rating scale. That is, response terms were being used that in standard linguistic usage were relative to context, leaving open the possibility that no illusion was involved when a shift in context was followed by a shift in terms used. Proving the “genuine illusoriness” of such effects was important enough to me that I set about replicating such studies employing a “judgmental language that was absolute, extensive, and extra-experimentally anchored,” in an experimental design in which a “tracer stimulus” recurred at all stages during a gradual shift in stimulus range.
At the time that Sherif and Hovland (1961) were in the thick of their collaboration, I spent the spring of 1955 at Yale, at Hovland’s invitation. There I met O. J. Harvey, coauthor and augmentor of the present book, who was spending a postdoctoral year at Yale after finishing a Ph.D. with Sherif. Harvey and I became close friends and soon initiated a study in which judgments of weights were made in ounces, apparently the first time this had been done in the vast psychophysical literature on lifted weights (Harvey and Campbell 1963). Similarly, judgments of pitch were made in terms of notes on a schematic five-octave piano keyboard, easily producing an illusory shift of one whole octave in judgments of the tracer stimulus (Campbell, Lewis, and Hunt 1958). Using the same experimental paradigm, line length was judged in terms of inches (Krantz and Campbell 1961), and an “externally anchored response language” was approximated for judgments of the psychopathology demonstrated by specific symptoms (Campbell, Hunt, and Lewis 1958). Using a different approach to absoluteness, context effects were reproduced in judgments of gifts, traffic violations, and behavioral eccentricity (Hicks and Campbell, 1965). In all of these cases, the same contrast illusions were demonstrated that had been found with the prior judgmental response terms, convincing me that they were genuinely illusory, that the judges were totally unaware of their shifts in judgment standards. Still, today this great effort—lost effort in the sense that these papers go uncited—seems worth it to me, so important is the point. This was also much of my motivation in my single (more cited) utilization of Sherif’s autokinetic judgment task (Jacobs and Campbell 1961). I am happy to report that the many judgmental tasks in the present volume use natural, linguistically absolute response languages rather than linguistically comparative ones. For that matter, so did the original autokinetic movement judgment task, to wit, judgments in inches.
The influence of Sherif’s several field studies on intergroup conflict in the boys’ summer camp “laboratory” show up in a still larger commitment of my scholarly energies. The setting is Northwestern University in a period of high interdisciplinary participation, especially among anthropology, political science, sociology, and psychology. In addition to Herskovits, the principal fund raiser for such projects was the political scientist Richard C. Snyder, who also had the greatest admiration for Sherif and brought him to our campus as often as possible. (Appropriately, the Sherif and Sherif 1969 conference on “Interdisciplinary Relationships in the Social Sciences” had three participants from Northwestern University, including me.) Robert A. LeVine, anthropologist with a joint appointment in political science, and I (Campbell and LeVine 1961) decided that the “field manual method” of securing brief collaborations from anthropologists in the field that had worked so well on optical illusions (Segall, Campbell, and Herskovits 1966) should be put to work on the more important topic of intergroup conflict and attitudes. There followed 15 years of intensive effort (LeVine 1961, 1965, 1966; Campbell 1965, 1967; Campbell and LeVine 1968, 1970; Brewer 1968), culminating in two volumes (LeVine and Campbell, with Brewer, 1972; Brewer and Campbell 1976), although the project was never completed.
Needless to say, these efforts built upon Sherif’s pioneering work and theoretical analyses in the great research program that culminated in the present volume. (We cite first Sherif and Sherif 1953, but I have on my shelf, obviously read, the very first presentation, Sherif 1951.) In Ethnocentrism (Campbell and LeVine, with Brewer, 1972), we presented propositional inventories of ten theories. Two chapters in particular represent Sherif’s views: “Realistic Group Conflict Theory,” and “Reference Group Theory.” As to the latter, since we use his own phrasing, there is no doubt that he would agree with the classification. I am less sure about the former, and do not remember that he and I have ever discussed it. Another feature that we have not discussed is that Ethnocentrism placed both of the Sherifian theories among the “societal” theories rather than among the “sociopsychological” ones (in other words, among the five sociological theories rather than the five psychological ones). Explicating this may provide background alerting readers of the present volume to important issues in the theory of intergroup relations, which they might otherwise miss.
From the 1930s through World War II and beyond, theories of Freudian inspiration dominated social-scientific thought about intergroup hostility. Led by Dollard’s (1938; Dollard, et al., 1939), frustration-aggression-displacement theorists interpreted hostility toward outgroups as displaced projections of frustrations generated within the ingroup, most likely within the family. While such theorizing was sometimes accompanied by positing that ingroup coordination always involved such frustration, as in MacCrone’s (1937) psychoanalytic interpretation of race attitudes in South Africa, more frequently it was explicit or implied that such ingroup frustration and displacement onto outgroups characterized only pathological groups. Social science interpretations of Nazi Germany, including analyses done by prominent political scientists furthered this position. After World War II, the great “Authoritarian Personality” studies (Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, and Sanford 1947; Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, and Sanford 1950) lent support to the notion that ethnocentrism and xenophobia were characteristic of only some people and were to be explained by the pathology-producing (even if traditional) rearing they had received as children.
While Sherif has from the beginning (e.g., 1936; Sherif and Cantril 1947) made sympathetic use of Freudian theories, he has seen this particular application as wrong. From the first, he has emphasized that we are all much more ethnocentric than we realize, including liberal, well-intentioned social scientists (perhaps particularly those lacking deep cross-cultural experiences) (e.g., Sherif 1936, 16; Sherif and Sherif 1969, viii). Indeed, the emphasis on unconscious processes was one of the features that made Freudian theory attractive. According to Sherif, instead of being due to individual or group pathology, intergroup conflict and hostility are products of social structures, including the very organization of persons into discrete and potentially competing social groups. Given these circumstances, all of us (including the healthy, the well adjusted, those reared by non-punitive parents, etc.)—all of us are capable of participating in intergroup conflict accompanied by outgroup hatred. The meticulous care in selecting participants for this Robbers Cave study was taken to preclude pathology as explanation.