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Tangled Beginnings

It was a hot, overcast summer day in 1954 as a yellow bus drove twelve boys towards the foothills of the San Bois Mountains in south-eastern Oklahoma. The drive from Oklahoma City took just over four hours, and most of the boys, who had been strangers when they boarded the bus, had made new friends by the time they arrived.

Social psychologist Muzafer Sherif had chosen the location carefully. The attractions of the nearest town, McAlester, with its soda fountains and picture theatre, were far behind, but the boys didn’t mind. The Robbers Cave State Park would be theirs for the next three weeks. It was their first summer camp, a sojourn that promised excitement and adventure. Outside of McAlester, the bus took a winding dirt road and ascended the mountain. Thunder rolled in the distance, promising rain that never came.

They turned off at a pyramid of logs carved with the letters ‘Robbers Cave State Park’, named because it was the hiding place of legendary outlaws such as Jesse James and Belle Starr. It seemed an ideal setting. A handful of pretty stone cabins dotted the treed park. There were lakes and a stream for swimming, a mess hall, a baseball pitch. And the mountains, with their hidden caves.

The boys explored the park, hiking, canoeing, and swimming. After they saw two rattlesnakes at the creek, they named themselves the Rattlers. For a few days they had the place to themselves, and pretty soon they felt as if they owned it. What they didn’t know was another yellow bus had arrived, carrying a second group of boys from Oklahoma City, and that soon they would be locked in fierce competition.

Two weeks later, their faces covered with camouflage paint, the Rattler boys crept up in the darkness towards the cabin of their enemy, the interlopers who called themselves the Eagles. The Rattler boys raided the cabin, upturning beds, emptying suitcases, and terrorising the frightened Eagles. The midnight raid sparked days of retaliation and violence.

Nothing like the Robbers Cave experiment had been done before or has been done since. Dr Muzafer Sherif and his team of researchers, disguised as camp staff, closely observed the two groups during what the boys had been told was a regular summer camp. Sherif predicted that when he brought two groups together in a week-long contest of games and feats of skill, for which only one group would win a much-valued prize, the boys’ attitudes would intensify from friendly rivalry to something closer to hatred. Normally well-adjusted boys would become ‘nasty’ and ‘aggressive’ towards the members of the rival group.

Social psychologist Muzafer Sherif is best known for this experiment in the wilds of Oklahoma, and what it says about the bonds of loyalty and the power of groups. He argued that it wasn’t the boys’ personalities that made them behave like savages — after all, he had deliberately chosen normal, well-adjusted kids. And it wasn’t differences in ethnicity or religion, either. He deliberately chose boys from similar backgrounds. Prejudice and conflict arises between groups of people, he argued, because of competition for limited resources. When groups of people compete for a valuable prize and there’s only one winner, hatred and violence is inevitable. But it is reversible, according to Sherif. If groups cooperate to find a solution together, the boundaries between them dissolve, hatred is forgotten, and enemies become friends.

When Dr David Baker at the Archives of the History of American Psychology in Akron, Ohio, told me that the Sherif family had just donated all the papers, films, and recordings related to the Robbers Cave experiment, I only pretended to know which experiment he was talking about. As far as I recalled, Sherif’s work was not included in my undergraduate psychology textbooks at La Trobe University or in any of my subsequent postgraduate training. That might have been because the kind of psychology I studied was very much the ‘rats and stats’ variety that aligned itself with the hard sciences. Bona fide social psychological research at my university had been laboratory-based and highly structured, using adult subjects and statistical techniques that reflected a kind of rigour and control and attested to the scientific credentials of the researcher in charge. A three-week field experiment that relied heavily on observation would have belonged over in the school of sociology, alongside the work of Sherif’s mentors and colleagues, such as William Foote Whyte and his study of a Chicago slum, or in the school of anthropology, alongside Margaret Mead’s equally famous research in Samoa. The truth is, Sherif’s work didn’t fit neatly into either discipline, and after I began to research his life I began to see this difficulty in categorisation as a metaphor for Sherif himself.

Dr Baker told me how the Robbers Cave would make a great book. But I was visiting the archives towards the end of four years of research about Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments, and the prospect of embarking on another project was the last thing on my mind. As part of my research for the book on Milgram, I had listened to hundreds of gruelling hours of recordings of the obedience experiments, in which participants believed they were delivering electric shocks to a stranger: the repeated cries of an actor pretending to receive electric shocks and the pleadings and distress of the men and women being ordered by a stern experimenter to keep increasing the voltage. I’d also tracked down and met with some of Milgram’s subjects, who, fifty years later, were still agitated and troubled by the experience. In the course of it all, I had traded the idea of social psychology as an exciting discipline that shed light on human nature for a much more cynical view. Experiments such as Milgram’s, that I’d so admired at university for their clever construction of elaborate theatrical scenarios to disguise their purpose, seemed to offer little beyond the rather obvious conclusion that people can be deceived and manipulated into doing things they would never normally do. As for the experimenters, I had spent enough time trawling through Milgram’s papers to feel disenchanted with the valorisation of the daring and brilliant scientist whose fearless pursuit of the truth justified any pain he might have inflicted on his subjects. I was burnt out.

Sherif’s Robbers Cave experiment might have sat at the intersection of the disciplines of anthropology, sociology, and psychology, but it was similar in some key ways to Milgram’s obedience experiments. Both used deception and subterfuge to observe subjects in secret; both constructed a scenario where participants in the drama faced a moral dilemma. In Milgram’s lab, the subjects’ dilemma was whether to obey or disobey an experimenter’s instructions to give electric shocks to another person. In Sherif’s state park, the boys were caught between the dictates of conscience that told them not to inflict harm and the powerful pull of their need to belong. I felt angry on behalf on Milgram’s subjects, whom I’d come to see as victims of a discipline that cloaked lessons about humanity’s moral weakness and vulnerability in the language of science. I had no appetite for research into another experiment of that kind, especially given that Muzafer Sherif’s subjects were children.

But I feigned interest as Dr Baker showed me round. I spent the rest of the afternoon looking through files and folders, taking photographs of documents, in a desultory and half-hearted way. Yet in the space of those few hours, I began to see that Sherif’s work was markedly different to Milgram’s. And the more I compared the two men, the more interested I became in Sherif.

In contrast to Stanley Milgram, who seemed to flit from one increasingly kooky experiment to another during his career, privately agonising over whether his research was more art than science — or if it meant anything at all — Sherif’s papers revealed a man with a singular focus and an apparently unshakeable faith in his own theory. Sherif made Milgram look like a dilettante. It wasn’t just the volume of material Sherif wrote that struck me, but the fact that over a fifty-year research career, he explored variations of a single theme: the power of tribal loyalty, in-groups and out-groups, to shape our worlds.

Both Milgram and Sherif devised experiments that were part of a wider struggle to understand how ordinary people came to participate and collude in the brutality and violence of war. For Milgram, exploring the behaviour of Germans under the Nazi regime, the question was whether it had something to do with the German character. Had the surge of anti-Semitism encouraged by National Socialism been lying dormant all along? Milgram attributed it to a universal instinct for following orders. Sherif was convinced that the answer lay in the power of the groups we belong to and identify with, which shapes the way we behave. For Sherif, a group was more than a collection of individuals: once bonds were formed, tribes developed their own culture, with leaders and followers, rules and standards distinct from the ones an individual might hold dear. The group takes on a life and a personality of its own.

Milgram’s shocking results, as well as an entrepreneurial streak and gift for self-promotion, propelled him and his obedience experiments into lasting fame. But when I googled Muzafer Sherif and the Robbers Cave experiment, I was surprised at how brief both pages on Wikipedia were, offering few details beyond a summary of the research and the bare facts of Muzafer Sherif’s life. There were articles about the experiments, of course, and academic monographs. But still. Why wasn’t Muzafer Sherif better known?

He certainly had the personality and the chutzpah. Many of his contemporaries describe him as a man who loved being the centre of attention, who could be charming sometimes, arrogant others, and was always convinced of his own genius. Sherif took credit for converting shy young Solomon Asch to the idea of studying psychology during their time at Columbia University. The social psychology family tree being what it was, without Solomon Asch there would be no Stanley Milgram. Sherif bragged to colleagues that with the Robbers Cave experiment he’d broken the mould of social psychological research. Yet Sherif made only one foray into the popular press, in 1969, fifteen years after the Robbers Cave experiment was over, when he wrote an article about it for The Washington Post. A Hollywood producer contacted him almost immediately, saying he wanted to make a film based on the experiment, but Sherif refused to have anything to do with it. If Sherif’s reticence wasn’t due to shyness, I wondered, what was it that made him shrink from the public gaze?

The small amount I knew about Muzafer Sherif was contradictory and confusing — he both craved attention and shied away from it, he was cautious and a risk-taker, highly regarded and an outsider.

The brief biography online told me that he was born in Turkey and his American career started with great promise, first at Harvard, then at Princeton and Yale. So how and why did Sherif end up at a comparatively lowly university like the University of Oklahoma? What led him to these remote locations, these groups of warring boys? If, as historian Jill Lepore argues, psychological research is autobiographical, what mirror did the Robbers Cave experiments hold up to Sherif’s own life?

Archivist Lizette Royer Barton pulled on white cotton gloves to carefully unpack a grubby calico flag. It was the size of a couple of pillowcases, featuring a childish painting of an eagle with a snake in its talons. The flag was among hundreds of items that Sherif brought away with him from the experiment and stored in a wooden trunk that eventually made its way to the archives after his death. Lizette then carefully unfurled a paint-spattered pair of jeans with the words ‘The Last of the Eagles’ painted in orange capital letters down both legs. In photos of the experiment, you can see a group of boys holding them on a pole like a flag, taunting their opponents. The theft and vandalism were acts of aggression, the denim trophy the symbol of a nation state in Sherif’s eyes.

Looking at the jeans, with their narrow waistband, lying flat on the table, I couldn’t help but think of the boy who had worn them. It was as if the boy himself lay on the table. They seemed further evidence of a branch of science that I had begun to think of as careless in its treatment of people, that used manipulation and deception to make a point and viewed the distress of human subjects as a necessary price to pay.

Later that day, in reading about how the Robbers Cave experiment came about, I found that Sherif had conducted two earlier similar experiments. In the first experiment, in 1949, Sherif took twenty-four underprivileged boys from New Haven to a remote farm called Happy Valley, in Colebrook, a town in the Litchfield Hills in Connecticut. After a few days where the boys mixed and played, he divided the friends into two groups and organised a three-day contest of games. Fighting broke out between the two groups after the winners were announced, and the prized knives went to the victors. Over lunch on the last day, the two groups were ‘lined up on opposite sides of the mess hall calling names and finally throwing food, cups, table knives …’

Having proved his theory that friends will become enemies when they are forced to compete, Sherif declared the experiment over and instructed staff to ‘do away with the hostility’. But it was easier said than done. Despite staff attempts to restore trust between them, the boys continued to retaliate against one another with fights, night raids, and surprise attacks. This gave Sherif an idea. In his second experiment, he looked at ways to reverse mistrust, hostility, and violence between warring groups and engineer a lasting peace.

While the first experiment was a success, his larger second one in 1953 had been aborted. I felt a tug of interest as I read this. What did a failed experiment about the inevitability of war and the restoration of peace look like? Had the boys resisted the attempts at peace or at war? It was difficult to find a straightforward answer. Sherif had published a number of detailed descriptions of his first experiment in 1949, and a whole book about his Robbers Cave experiment. But I could find only occasional passing references to the 1953 study, and almost nothing about why it had been cancelled. It was as if Sherif wanted to forget it.

But in the archives, unpublished material about this 1953 camp experiment took up almost as much space as the files and folders about his Robbers Cave experiment, held just a year later. There I found audio recordings, film footage, photos, detailed observers’ notes, invoices, instructions, and letters about the 1953 study, all jumbled in together in seemingly little order. But there was no overall narrative to tie this mountain of raw data into a story of what had happened or how and why it ended.

Sorting through all that archival material and piecing the narrative together would be like trying to reconstruct a document from a mountain of shredded paper. But I already felt sure the story of the failed experiment was there in those papers and recordings, and I had the feeling that the answer to the contradictory and intriguing figure of Muzafer Sherif was somewhere in those boxes, too.