IN THE summer of 1954, a bus pulled into in the mountains of rural Oklahoma. The dozen 11-year-old boys on board, all of them strangers to each other, craned to catch a glimpse through the dusty windows of what for most of them was their first summer camp. For a week they explored the park, , and hiked in and around mountain caves. They didnât know that a couple of days later, a second group arrived, also believing they had the park to themselves.
Social psychologist and his team, disguised as camp counsellors, watched each group bond and form its own identity. The two groups named themselves the Rattlers and the Eagles, each with flag, anthem, dress code, leaders and followers, as well as shared rules and standards. âThey staked out their territory,â Sherifâs research assistant, O.J. Harvey, told me. âEverything was âourâ â âour hideoutâ, âour creekâ.â The Rattlers felt particular ownership of the baseball field, which they had cleared and marked out.
Gradually, each group became aware of the other: when the Rattlers discovered some empty cups in their hideout and heard the sounds of others playing on the baseball field, they began to resent the interlopers. Finally, Sherif brought the two groups together in five days of competition, in everything from baseball to tent-pitching. The winners would be awarded a group trophy and a handsome jackknife for each boy, the losers nothing. From their first interaction on the baseball field, the Rattlers and the Eagles regarded each other with hostility and suspicion, according to Sherif. Throughout the tournament, the adults fanned rivalry between them, covertly stacking the odds against one team, then the other, increasing the tension and keeping the scores neck and neck.
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Hostilities reached fever pitch halfway through the competition. The Rattlers, faces smeared with soot, crept up to the Eaglesâ cabin in the dark. Bill Snipes, now a retired detective but back then one of the Rattlers, recalls the raid: âI climbed through their window and almost fell on one boy. I woke him up and he was not happy. He started swinging at me. We tore their place up. They did the same to us. It was almost like the counsellors were building this animosity.â Days of warring words and fisticuffs followed, with staff only intervening to break things up before anyone got seriously hurt. The violence ended only when the staff engineered a disaster by cutting off the campâs water supply. In calling for volunteers to help, Harvey hinted that unknown saboteurs may have been at work; that the park had a history of vandalism. All the boys duly volunteered, perhaps fired up by the idea of a common enemy.
At the top of the hill behind the mess hall, the two groups found the water line buried beneath boulders and some sacking jammed into the pipes. As the temperature climbed towards 40°C, they realised that they would slake their growing thirst sooner if they worked as a single team to clear the obstructions. This saw the group boundaries blur and, in a series of problem situations devised by Sherif over the final week of the three-week study, dissolve.
By the time the boys returned home â this time in a single bus â their antagonisms had been forgotten. They were a cohesive group who sang Oklahoma! with gusto.
Sherifâs Robbers Cave study is remembered less for its happy ending than for its startling demonstration of just how quickly animosity can develop between people who have no reason to hate each other â an indictment of human nature. Carried out in the year that was published, the study is often twinned with the novel. Both involve the transformation of children in the wilderness, a descent into savagery and violence. Sherif described how an observer chancing on the interactions at Robbers Cave would have never have guessed these âdisturbed, vicious⊠wicked youngstersâ were in fact the âcream of the cropâ in their middle-class home communities.
âThe Rattlers, faces smeared with soot, crept up to the Eaglesâ cabin in the darkâ
But the scientistâs and novelistâs views of human nature couldnât have been more different. For Golding, âman produces evil as a bee produces honeyâ and his novel was, he said, âan attempt to trace the defects in society back to human natureâ. For Sherif it was the other way round: people were inherently good and it was the environment â economic, political, social â that set groups competing against each other, fostering rivalry, prejudice and violence. If Golding was a pessimist, Sherif was an optimist: he thought you could foster peaceful coexistence between warring tribes by changing the environment.
The roots of Sherifâs experiment lay far from rural Oklahoma. Sherif had arrived in the US from his native Turkey in 1929 at the age of 23, as part of a wave of young intellectuals sent abroad by the new government of Mustafa Kemal (later called AtatĂŒrk) to study and bring back the tools for shaping a new nation. After a stint at Harvard University, Sherif ended up at Columbia University in New York City.
When Sherif arrived, the city was in the grip of the Great Depression. He was appalled by the suffering of thousands of unemployed and homeless people who flooded the streets. At rallies he heard of the antagonism and racism between working people competing for jobs and housing, and passionate calls for the poor and unemployed to unite for radical social change. Moved by the disenfranchised and what he saw as the cruelty of the capitalist system, Sherif gravitated towards a group of intellectuals who thought that communism offered a framework for understanding the chaos of the Great Depression and the rise of fascism, racial prejudice and anti-Semitism. In his first book in 1936, he blamed a âcompetitive individualistic bourgeois societyâ for creating frictions between different social classes, believing that âthe classes themselves must be eliminatedâ.
But on his return to Turkey in 1937, Sherif found such views unwelcome. In 1944, he was swept up in the first of a series of anti-communist purges and was briefly jailed, before his influential family secured his release. Disenchanted, he appealed to friends in the US to help him find a job, and soon after left Turkey for Princeton University.
But in his years away from the US, and cut off by the second world war, the country had changed; the vibrant left-wing intellectual scene Sherif had been part of in New York had dissipated. Sherifâs idealism was undimmed: in a 1947 book he co-wrote, he expressed sympathy for Marxism and admiration for what he saw as the benefits of Russian collectivism over the capitalist culture of the US. With his ideology clear, he set about devising an experiment to âproveâ that collectivism trumps competition.
Fight snub
In 1949, 1953 and 1954, Sherif conducted summer-camp experiments in three locations. In 1949, the two warring tribes united following the introduction of a third group, a common enemy. In 1953, the boys all mixed as one large group for a day before being separated into teams. Sherif wanted to show he could turn friends into enemies. It backfired: the boys mutinied against the staff, whom they accused of trying to make them fight. Sherif approached the final experiment âwith a definite script in mindâ, says Harvey, and at Robbers Cave he finally got the results he wanted.
During those first camp studies, the themes Sherif was researching â of friends and foes, loyalty and betrayal â were being played out in his own life. The political climate that drove him from Turkey was making itself felt in the US as the cold war began to bite. In 1949, he took a job at the University of Oklahoma just before the state legislature launched a committee to investigate communism and required that state employees and university staff swear loyalty to the US. In signing the oath, Sherif swore he had not been part any communist-leaning groups in the previous five years. As a foreign-born scientist working on navy-funded research, he was considered a security risk and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover launched an investigation into him. FBI agents interviewed Sherifâs mentors and colleagues, librarians and landladies, shopkeepers and administrative staff who had known him in the US, as well as some who had known him in Turkey. One so-called friend told investigators that Sherif âwould have no hesitation in providing all the information he might possess to the Russiansâ. But no one else repeated the claim, and Sherif was cleared.
This climate of fear shaped the way Sherif presented his work. Early on, describing the way the animosity erupted between the two groups, Sherif wrote that the boysâ behaviour reflected the dynamics of a competitive society that divided people into the âhaves and have-notsâ. In the McCarthyite climate of the time, this could be read as suspiciously pro-communist, and between the first draft of his 1949 summer camp study and its final report, Sherif distanced himself from his political past. He also began to play down any deliberate manipulation that the researchers engaged in to escalate friction between the groups or engineer the environment to gain specific results.
From the final draft of his 1949 report through to his book , Sherif crafted a narrative in which social classes became âgroupsâ, political ideologies became âenvironmentsâ and the researcher performing feats of social engineering to demonstrate his theory became invisible.
In reality, however, Sherifâs team took increasingly active roles in the three experiments. Archive material reveals how at Robbers Cave, for example, they encouraged the Eagles and Rattlers to retaliate against each other, accompanying the boys on raids.
Modern research ethics mean that such an experiment cannot be repeated today, so we may never know how a Robbers Cave scenario would unfold with no adults to stoke factionalism. Since it was conducted, the Robbers Cave study has become a classic in social psychology and beyond, referenced in developmental psychology, neuroscience and in evolutionary explanations of discrimination, prejudice, conflict and war.
But in accepting Sherifâs politically neutral account of his own research, it is easy to overlook the amount of social engineering involved and what it says about the power of manipulation. In a world in which racism and tribalism are on the rise, the real lesson of Robbers Cave is not that humans are hardwired for war, but that we should look beyond warring factions and behind the scenes, to ask whose interests â political, national, corporate â are being served by division and conflict.
This article appeared in print under the headline âReal-life Lord of the Fliesâ
