2

In the Wild

On the other side of the Atlantic, just as Muzafer Sherif was wrapping up his first summer camp and preparing for his second, a schoolmaster was conducting a similar experiment high above England’s Salisbury Plain.

On the road to Stonehenge there’s a small brown sign pointing to a place called Figsbury Ring. The rutted and bumpy lane from the A30 climbs past a farm selling local honey and ends in a small, pot-holed car park. A final rise brings you out on top of a hill, where two concentric trenches trace the outline of an Iron Age fort and its ramparts. Up here, from the top of the mound, there’s spectacular views of the Salisbury Plain, the spires of the cathedral glinting in the distance on a sunny day. It was here around 1951 that local schoolteacher William Golding, who was interested in understanding ‘the nature of small boys’, brought a group of schoolboys to this remote and ancient place. He divided them into two groups and instructed one group to attack and the other to defend the mound, looking to see what would happen if no adult intervened.

According to Golding, he got more than he bargained for. The two groups attacked each other with increasing ferocity the further their teacher moved away. ‘My eyes came out like organ stops as I watched what was happening,’ he told an audience in a lecture at the University of California in 1961. He did not say precisely what he saw, but he hinted that there was serious violence, even the risk of boys being killed: ‘“Give me liberty, or give me death” — well, it was a point where these were no longer simple alternatives.’ It’s impossible to know whether Golding exaggerated the violence in this episode, but it’s no coincidence that artists and social scientists continents apart were conducting experiments on groups of children in conflict. The difference was that Golding’s was carried out as research for his next book: the novel Lord of the Flies.

The reverberations of World War II and its mob violence drew both the writer and the social psychologist to the idea of warring groups of children. But their conclusions couldn’t have been more different. Golding, who had served in the Royal Navy and taken part in the invasion of Normandy, returned home with a fervent belief that ‘man produces evil as a bee produces honey’. He described the theme of his allegorical novel about a group of shipwrecked boys as ‘an attempt to trace the defects in society back to the defects of human nature. The moral is that the shape of a society must depend on the ethical nature of the individual and not on any political system.’

Golding’s view of human nature had more in common with mainstream psychology at that time than Muzafer Sherif’s did. It was a variation on the riff of original sin — his belief in which, he said, came directly from his experiments, practical experiences, and observations. In his novel, Golding projected his view of the ‘true’ nature of savagery onto the children.

In Sherif’s view, human nature had little to do with it. People were inherently good, and it was an environment — whether economic, political, or social — that fostered inequality between social groups and created the ideal conditions for discrimination and mistreatment to flourish, spilling over into conflict, violence, and war. An idealist, Sherif believed that by understanding group psychology, social scientists could work to dissolve prejudice and persecution, reduce nationalistic antagonisms, and foster peaceful co-existence across the world.

But the popular perception of an experiment involving children is that it captures something more raw and elemental. And like Golding’s Lord of the Flies, the fact that Sherif’s experiments took place in the wild, away from the distractions of city life, reinforced the idea that he had accessed something intrinsic to human nature. Despite Sherif’s conclusion that hate is learned, his research is often twinned with Golding’s novel, as if he too observed a ‘natural’ savagery of the kind depicted in Lord of the Flies.

Writers and social scientists such as Golding and Sherif, horrified and sickened by war, were not alone in regarding children as a canvas onto which they could project anxieties and hopes, fears and dreams. In the 1930s, research with groups of children focused on understanding the lure of Nazism and inoculating American society against it. In an experiment conducted late in the decade, German émigré psychologist Kurt Lewin explored how dominant political ideologies shape behaviour, using eleven-year-old boys as subjects. The boys took part in a craft workshop led by either an autocratic or a democratic leader. The results showed that boys whose leader was domineering and autocratic were more hostile and aggressive, while those with a democratically-minded and inclusive leader were more cooperative, friendly, and supportive of one another. Lewin’s research pointed not only to the impact of the political doctrines of Germany and the United States but also suggested ways in which future citizens could be protected from fascism and moulded to embrace democratic ideals. For Lewin, the groups of children were both a template for new citizens and proxies for society at large.

A decade later, by 1949, funding of social psychological research had expanded to reflect the Cold War anxieties of the era. With the looming danger of an atomic attack, the spectre of totalitarian brainwashing, and the threat of communism, the US military became increasingly interested in the psychology of small groups. Kurt Lewin’s students continued his work, studying groups of children in natural settings, superimposing the political anxieties of the era onto children at play. A group who made a game of pretending to sink to the bottom of a swimming pool was a metaphor for the stirrings of a collective mind; a group led to sing the same lewd song was an insight into how rumours and panic spread, into how a leader could either inspire or quell loyalty. This kind of play was labelled ‘contagious’, as if it was a sickness to be caught, a disease that would leap from person to person with frightening efficiency, creating a new and dangerous strain that could spread in ever-widening circles. The children were stand-ins for adults; the swimming pool and the campfire ring, for society at large.

Muzafer Sherif never publicly discussed or recorded in his notes why he chose to use eleven-year-olds as his subjects, but he admired Lewin, and selecting subjects of the same age would have allowed for direct comparison between his and Lewin’s work. Studying children had particular benefits, too. They were easier to deceive, so their reactions were more likely to be spontaneous and revealing. And ten- and eleven-year-olds had a level of maturity and social skills that younger children lacked, but hadn’t yet developed the adolescent rebelliousness that could make them uncooperative.

Some exasperated researchers yearned for a research environment that allowed continuous access to child subjects, free from the interference of home life and other ‘contaminants’ that could undermine the purpose of their research. Summer camps provided just such a setting. Child psychologist Mary Northway wrote in 1940:

The summer camp offers an ideal field for research for the social psychologist. It is an isolated, constant, temporary group, as far removed from the ordinary roads of social intercourse as a south sea island. Camp suddenly comes into existence when a group of individuals, cut off from the ties of their normal societies, are thrust together in one geographic community, and a new society is created. While camp lasts, it is an isolated community; and it may be considered a society in miniature.

By the time Sherif began his first study in 1949, using summer camps as psychological laboratories was a well-established practice. But what he had in mind was a new twist.

The first organised summer camp in North America had a character-building focus, and camps ever since have continued this tradition — although definitions of good character have changed with the times.

Early founders of the camping movement were educated men worried about the evils of progress. The original American camp took place in 1861, when schoolmaster Fred Gunn took his pupils on a two-week stint of outdoor activities to improve their mental and physical development under the guidance of adult mentors.

Just under twenty years later, in 1880, Camp Chocorua was established by tutor Ernest Balch to toughen up wealthy boys whom he considered at risk of effeminacy because they spent too much time with their mothers. Balch had plenty of marketing savvy, and his view that modern young men risked growing soft in the lap of luxury, doing nothing and learning nothing of value during the indolent summer months, was covered widely in popular magazines such as McClure’s and Outdoor Life. Camp leaders and parents embraced the idea that lessons in masculinity could be learned from a structured outdoor life — the same lessons learned by the pioneers, whose contact with nature made them strong and hardy. The mainly urban families who signed up their sons for these camps hoped the boys would develop physical sturdiness, moral character, self-reliance, resourcefulness, and Christian values.

Initially, camps based on the back-to-nature movement were reserved for the wealthy. By the turn of the twentieth century, social reform and charitable organisations such as the Fresh Air Fund were running camps for poor city children to give them a break from urban life and a chance to build up their physical strength. In many cases, the children were also offered a dose of religious instruction. ‘Feed ’em well and let them breathe fresh air’ was the motto. Daily camp life followed a highly structured routine, beginning with the wake-up bell or bugle call, breakfast, chores, and days filled with athletic activities, games, and team competitions.

Summer camps adopting similar principles flourished across North America between the late 1880s and early 1900s, and were given fresh impetus with the arrival of the Boy Scout movement in 1910. Robert Baden-Powell, a British army officer, attributed the disastrous performance of his army during the Boer War — where British victory was achieved only after huge cost and massive reinforcements — to weakness of character, demonstrated in soldiers’ poor attitudes towards authority and inexperience in living outdoors. He conducted his first two-week ‘boy training’ camp in 1907, housing twenty-two boys on isolated Brownsea Island, in England. The idea quickly spread: before 1900, there were less than a hundred camps in North America, but by 1918 there were more than a thousand.

The newly emerging discipline of psychology added a new dimension to the romanticised idea of taking children back to nature as an antidote to the perils of urban life. Popular psychologists such as G. Stanley Hall endorsed summer camps as places where children could benefit psychologically from an escape to a simpler and less complicated world.

After World War I, camp leaders influenced by the Progressive social theory of John Dewey began to design camp communities that mirrored the adult communities they wanted to create. Progressives viewed the camp experience as a means to strengthen democracy, build a more just and equitable society, fight authoritarianism, and foster the principles of good citizenship. In 1927, Professor Elbert Fretwell began the first camp leadership course at Columbia University, and a new profession was founded. Camp administrators drew on psychological research for the latest information on the best ways of working with groups.

Progressive educators took a scientific approach towards child behaviour and educational theory. So it didn’t take long for psychologists to get involved in evaluating the best techniques for shaping camper behaviour. Camp leaders began using scientific instruments and tools such as sociograms — diagrams of how campers felt about one another — to identify boys who weren’t popular and take corrective action. Psychologist Richard Doty applauded psychological tools that could both diagnose and treat problems: ‘We can quickly set to work with the less accepted campers to develop skills and attitudes making for better group acceptance and more positive and acceptable social philosophy.’

Therapeutic camps for youth with mental or behavioural problems opened up in the 1920s. The first was Camp Ramapo, in upstate New York, for ‘delinquent and problem children’. Apart from camp counsellors, psychiatrists and psychiatric social workers were also part of the staff, conducting observations, making diagnoses, and recommending further treatments. In a kayak or in a bunkhouse, in the dining hall or on the baseball pitch, the agenda of summer camp was to teach problem children the social skills for interacting successfully with peers. Away from the formal environment of the school or the clinic, in the relaxed atmosphere of the great outdoors, camp staff offered one-on-one talk sessions and interventions to help children overcome phobias and fears, build self-esteem, deal more assertively with bullies, or learn to control their aggressive or delinquent behaviour. Kurt Lewin’s famous studies on the effect of democratic and autocratic leadership styles on groups of children were incorporated into staff training to demonstrate the powerful effects of the camp counsellors’ style on camper behaviour. The idea of the summer camp as a place to transform the individual was now not just linked with theology or social reform, but also with science.

Yet notions of what constituted the ideal camper diversified too. In the 1920s and 1930s, the ideological function of summer camps expanded to accommodate broader political perspectives. ‘Red diaper’ camps sprang up for the children of more politically radical parents, as did Hitler Youth camps for the children of the German American Bund. In 1938, film footage of young American boys dressed in Nazi-inspired uniforms doing calisthenics, shooting rifles, and saluting the Nazi flag caused a public scandal. The relatively benign view of summer camp as a place for shaping character and turning out model citizens had taken on the sinister cast of indoctrination and brainwashing. The US government responded by setting up a committee to investigate the subversive activities of the German Bund. When it had finished, it turned its attention to the activities of American communists under the committee’s new head, one Senator Joseph McCarthy.

In the late 1940s, with the beginnings of the Cold War, the US government stepped up its efforts to develop weapons of psychological warfare, funding a network of communication studies centres across the country to continue the research efforts into propaganda that were established during the war. One of them was Yale’s Communication and Attitude Change Program, where Muzafer Sherif was working. The program’s neutral-sounding name deliberately avoided any association with the negative or manipulative connotations of propaganda, but the link to psychological coercion was there in its research. Programs such as Yale’s benefitted from the government’s obsession with psychological warfare, and social psychologists gained from this bonanza of government funding to study techniques of persuasion that could be used to deal with international conflict abroad as well as control of society at home. But by the late 1940s, America was involved in a new war, one that was as much about two competing ideologies, and the propaganda battle shifted to finding psychological weapons to fight the spread of subversive ideas.

Sherif’s mentor at Yale was Carl Hovland. One of Hovland’s research interests, gleaned from his war-time study of soldiers reluctant to fight, was the power of small groups in changing attitudes and behaviour. When it came to propaganda, Hovland found that fellow soldiers in the same troop were far more effective than military films at convincing unwilling soldiers to enter battle. Sherif’s idea for an experiment on the power of groups to shape the attitudes and prejudices of its members seemed, on the face of it, to continue in a similar vein.

Knowing Sherif’s interest in group influence, in March 1948 Ronald Lippitt, a former student of Kurt Lewin who had visited Yale to give a guest colloquium that year, invited him to collaborate in his research on children at summer camp, but Sherif turned him down. Observing children in a single group, as Lippitt had planned, was of no interest to him. But Lippitt’s study gave Sherif an idea. What better way to study the interactions between groups of boys than by running his own summer camp?

In September 1948, Sherif approached the American Jewish Committee, who published research into anti-Semitism, for $5,000 for his first study. In December, the chairman wrote that they did not normally fund research but they were bowled over by his enthusiasm: ‘One of the chief reasons for my interest in this project … is my realisation of its great meaning for you. Research which has poured into it a considerable amount of the researcher’s libido … turns out to be much more significant than research which is done for other reasons.’

Sherif wrote back gratefully: ‘[T]his particular research plan means an awful lot to me … [if it] will further just a little bit our understanding of group frictions and thereby eventually contribute one whit to their elimination, this will be the greatest reward for me.’

But he must have had his doubts about whether he’d be able to pull off what he had in mind. His plan was audacious and daring.

Among Sherif’s papers there’s a copy of the training manual for a four-day course for summer-camp staff. Titled Camping with Children, or Living and Learning Democratic Human Relations Together, the twenty-five-page handbook describes in detail what makes a good camp counsellor, and was a blueprint for staff training at the time. The ideal camp counsellor was someone well-versed in child and group psychology; who could foster cooperation and build strong relationships between the children; who was a good role model, an inspiring leader, a skilful problem-solver, and an empathic listener who offered counselling and guidance. The counsellor was responsible for the ‘happiness of their campers’, and happy campers were those who paid attention to and were responsible for other campers and staff.

The manual presents an idealistic and humanistic vision of summer camp as a place that develops children to be good leaders and responsible citizens who care for others, and ensures the greatest benefit for the group by developing the skills to live and work in harmony. But the experimental summer camp Sherif had in mind would require camp staff to do the opposite of their training: to abandon ideas of fair play and democracy and swap their commitment to the happiness of each boy in their care for the pursuit of scientific research.

While the camp counsellors were running a standard summer camp, with its usual activities — swimming, archery, hiking, sing-a-longs around the campfire — there would be a second, behind-the-scenes camp to conduct. In this shadow camp, experimenters would pull strings to ensure not a single happy group of campers but two hostile groups who viewed each other with suspicion. One layer of the camp would be the world as it should be — democratic, harmonious, fair — and the other would be the world perhaps as Sherif saw it — unjust, divided, full of violence and conflict.

For Sherif, finding staff who would embrace an upside-down summer camp, one that inverted an American institution and encouraged all the behaviours standard camps aimed to eradicate, would be no small job. And how would he gain the approval of parents to entrust their children into his care?

Sherif’s letters to parents are a lesson in the art of skilful deception and subtle persuasion. And he got better at them as time went on. Taking a leaf out of his mentor Carl Hovland’s book, Sherif used trusted sources in the community to allay suspicion and persuade parents of the benefits of allowing their boys to participate. In his letters, he appealed to the parents’ interests and provided just enough information to get their consent without alarming them about what might be in store.

For his first experiment in 1949, Sherif asked Episcopalian ministers in New Haven to identify and give him the addresses of poor and underprivileged families with eleven-year-old sons. He reasoned that such families were more likely to be swayed by the offer of a free camp. His subjects needed to be of ‘normal or higher intelligence, with no physical defects or serious emotional problems’. Sherif reassured ministers that religious observances would be maintained at the camp, with Sunday services and staff leading boys in saying grace before meals. Sherif was confident: he wrote in notes beforehand that, given the camp was free and included food, ‘it will be easy to get boys’.

In his letter to parents, he was vague on details: ‘The Yale Department of Psychology is co-operating in a study of child relations and social organization among children’, he wrote. A condition of agreement was for parents ‘not to visit’ because it might ‘distract’ the boys. In a draft of his final report on the experiment, he later wrote with satisfaction, ‘The parents and the boys were told that new methods of camping were being tried out. They never suspected there were any psychologists in the camp. They did not know that any manipulation of conditions for experimental purposes would be done or observations of behavior made.’ However, Sherif was bothered that some boys in the study were loners who had been reluctant to join in group activities.

For his second experiment in 1953, Sherif recruited boys from in and around Schenectady, New York. When he contacted local ministers, he was more specific about who he was looking for: ‘middle class … normal, healthy Protestant boys’ aged ten-and-a-half to twelve-and-a-half who were ‘well adjusted … “typical American Type”[s] who were “group minded” and who came from well-adjusted families, not from “broken homes”’. He didn’t want boys with signs of ‘delinquency or involved emotional problems such as frustration, strong mother attachment, etc.’ He didn’t want boys who were ‘cissies’ or ‘social isolates’, or boys who were ‘primarily interested in solitary recreational pursuits and hobbies: fishing, insect collecting, stamp collecting, etc.’

His letter to the parents was different, too:

For many years camp executives throughout the country have been trying to find out what camp activities will result in giving their campers a fruitful educational and recreational experience. These camp directors are interested in finding out what things can be done to give their boys and girls a wholesome cooperative living experience which will prepare the youngsters for better citizenship and to be leaders in their communities. The question is what camp programs best serve to enrich the life and experiences of growing children?

The purpose of this camp was ‘simply to study the best programs and procedures for campers which will develop cooperative and spiritual living’.

Instead of appealing to parents’ pockets, this time Sherif appealed to their aspirations for their children. The boys would be ‘carefully selected’; successful boys would receive a ‘scholarship’. He emphasised that the study was auspiced by prestigious institutions, including Yale and Union College. His letter portrays the camp as benign and instructive, and selection as a camper a privilege. There was no indication that parents were volunteering their children for a three-week psychological experiment that would require them to navigate some dubious moral terrain.

Fat, thin, quick-witted, slow, tall, short, outgoing, shy — William Golding would have identified each boy in his classroom by his distinguishing characteristics. But on the ancient hilltop at Figsbury Ring, their individuality was lost, and they merged into warring tribes.

Muzafer Sherif was not nearly as interested in individual boys as he was in groups. Already in the design of the recruitment letters he sent to ministers and parents, his focus was on their similarities, rather than their differences. In all three camp studies, he chose boys who were ‘homogenous’, their individuality swallowed up in generic categories of age, religion, hobbies, and family background.

By now I was gripped by the story of the experiments and had decided to write about them, but the characters were slippery. Encountering the experiments for the first time myself, it was difficult to keep track of individual boys — especially since in retellings of the experiments, Sherif and subsequent generations of social psychologists have often conflated his three camp studies so that the groups become even more blurred. And while this sense of anonymity, of universality, adds to the power of Sherif’s conclusions, it allows us to forget these groups of subjects were made up of individuals, each with a particular history and personality. What did they each make of the adult observers and their watchful distance from activities that would usually bring camp counsellors hurrying to intervene? When did they each notice that the usual rules for summer camp did not apply, and how did they feel about this?

By imagining them as a crowd, a mob, a mass, I felt complicit in a process of forgetting and erasure. But this is the dilemma of social psychological research: that the human subject becomes an object representative of a world of the social psychologist’s imagining. In the process of gaining insight into human social life, the researcher loses sight of what it is that makes us human — those qualities that define us as separate and unique.

In telling the story of his research, Sherif had plenty of material, in the form of observation notes, photographs, and even some film footage, much of which he never used in his final published reports. Of course, a process of selection is inevitable when social scientists are writing up their research, as they sift, choose, and shape the material they have into a story. But what’s often fascinating is what they leave out.

It seemed to me that in order to tell a balanced story, one that gave equal weight to the perspective of the researcher and the researched, scientist and subject, I had to re-create the world of Sherif’s summer camp and, in a story until now narrated by social psychologists and professors, make space for the voices and memories of the boys themselves.