3

Lost and Found

Perhaps science’s obsession with the notion of the lost boy began with nineteenth-century studies of feral children and the insights they offered into human nature. Perhaps psychology’s obsession started with Little Albert — or maybe it started long before him.

In the winter of 1919–1920, eleven-month Albert was a rosy-cheeked blond baby whose mother worked at the hospital at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, where the charismatic Doctor John Watson, regarded as the father of Behaviorism, had set up an infant laboratory. You can see pictures of Little Albert online, leaning away from Watson, who is looming over him, wearing a scary mask. Little Albert is famous as the child subject who proved Watson’s theory that emotional responses can be learned and unlearned, a process that became known as classical conditioning. Watson paired the loud and frightening noise of a hammer hitting a metal bar with the appearance of a small rat. Albert, who had reached happily for the animal at first, soon came to associate it with the terrifying noise and became agitated and afraid whenever the rat — and, later, other furry animals — appeared. We’ll never know whether Albert’s mother volunteered Albert willingly and discovered too late what the research involved, or whether she was coerced to hand Albert over. But she took Albert away abruptly, before Watson and his assistant, graduate student Rosalie Rayner, had a chance to de-condition the baby’s fear of furry animals.

Soon afterwards, Watson, the psychologist superstar, was sacked from his position at Johns Hopkins University for having an extramarital affair with the twenty-one-year-old Rayner. The scandal made front-page news across the country, and the pair fled to Manhattan. After a shaky start, Watson enjoyed a successful second career as an advertising executive.

The fate of Little Albert was unlikely to be so lucky, according to Watson and Rayner. Historian of psychology Ben Harris noted that although at first they said that any fear he experienced during the experiments was transitory, in a magazine article in 1920 they wrote that Little Albert ‘had probably suffered permanent harm’, a claim made not from callousness so much as to emphasise the power of the conditioning they had conducted on the baby. So the mystery of what happened to Little Albert and how he was affected by the experiment remained.

In his review of variations of the Little Albert story in textbooks, Harris points to significant deviations in Watson’s own reporting of the research, and writes about how startled he was to read the original article in which Watson and Rayner commented on their lack of success in inducing fear in the rosy-cheeked baby. The story has evolved over time, embroidered and shaped to support a particular theoretical standpoint and to make a comment about psychology in general — and, as Harris points out, to portray Watson as a martyred hero in the development of the discipline. ‘He undertakes work that no one else would,’ Harris writes of the perception of Watson that took hold. ‘He unemotionally pursues the truth while surrounded by the superstitious. Unfortunately, his perfectly designed experiment on Albert was cut short by the infant’s ignorant, ungrateful mother. Blackmailed by his wife, betrayed by Albert’s mother, Watson becomes a tragic figure, a victim of his single-minded pursuit of science.’

If Watson was portrayed as the tragic star of this famous story, what of Little Albert? Historians of psychology have been on the trail of the now elderly or deceased Albert. Psychological sleuths Hall P. Beck, Sharman Levinson, and Gary Irons were the first to claim that they’d found ‘psychology’s lost boy’. Albert, they wrote in 2009, was a child called Douglas Merritte who had died aged six of hydrocephalus. His mother had worked as a wet nurse at the orphanage opposite the hospital where Watson and Rayner were based and volunteered her baby for the research.

Such was Little Albert’s fame by the time of the researchers’ discovery that the BBC sent a film crew to record them visiting Merritte’s grave. Their find elicited huge public sympathy for the child. One reader commented on a blog that featured the story, ‘Little Albert is and will stay the James Dean of psychology, an experimental icon.’

In an update on the story in 2012, psychology professor Alan Fridlund and his co-authors argued that Watson knew during the experiment that baby Douglas had a neurological condition with symptoms that affected his motor and social skills and would have influenced his behavioural conditioning. They argued that in failing to disclose that his results were based on the behaviour of a child who was gravely ill, Watson had engaged not only in a serious breach of experimental ethics but also perpetuated a case of academic fraud.

The story was widely reported, and by 2014 a new myth was born, with psychology textbooks amending their portrayal of both Little Albert and Watson — the child portrayed as ‘neurologically impaired’ and the experimenter as ‘recklessly unethical’. Even authors of non-academic psychology books incorporated the story; for example, Joel Levy’s Freudian Slips: all the psychology you need to know points out that ‘… since Little Albert was not a healthy child, whatever value the study may have is destroyed, along with the remains of Watson’s reputation’.

But the Little Albert story was not over. In 2014, with the help of a professional genealogist, and after close examination of Watson’s film footage, psychologist Russell Powell and his colleagues concluded that Douglas Merrite was not Little Albert: they had found a more likely candidate. Little Albert, they argued, was a healthy child called Albert Barger. Quite apart from rescuing Watson’s reputation, here was an opportunity to put Watson’s claims for the power of learned responses in childhood to the test. Was adult Albert still frightened of furry animals?

Sadly, the researchers couldn’t ask Albert himself because he had died in 2007, at the age of eighty-seven. Instead they turned to the recollections of Albert’s niece, who had been close to her uncle. The results were tantalisingly inconclusive. She reported that throughout his life Albert’s family had teased him about his aversion to dogs, and recounted how dogs had to be kept in another room if Uncle Albert was visiting. Was this, as Albert had explained to the family, the after-effects of seeing his pet dog killed by a car when he was a young child? Or was it a legacy of Watson and Rayner’s experiment? Either way, the researchers concluded that Albert had never been told of his role in Watson’s research.

If Little Albert was psychology’s original ‘lost boy’, it seemed to me that Sherif’s subjects — from all three studies — were in some sense his descendants, and his compatriots: the lost boys. No one had ever set out to find them; no one had ever tracked them down. Like most of the subjects in psychology experiments in the first half of the twentieth century, they were nameless, faceless individuals who disappeared back into ordinary life once the experiment was over. Would finding them provide any definitive conclusions about the power of Sherif’s experiment? Would they carry some hidden legacy from the research they took part in as children? And what message had they each taken away from the experience, about themselves or about other people? Would they have grown up as warmongers, or peacemakers, or did the experiment have no effect on them at all? And what were their individual stories? Would finding the boys from the ‘lost’ experiment in 1953, with its hints of mutiny or resistance, provide a missing piece in the story of Robbers Cave?

‘I’m not traumatised by the experiment, but I don’t like lakes, camps, cabins, or tents,’ Doug Griset told me. ‘My kids always said, “Why is it, Dad, that you never want to go camping?”’ Doug laughed. ‘I always told them about this camp where I ended up in hospital, but no one believed me.’

We were talking on the phone, and he sounded excited. Doug was the first boy I found from the abandoned 1953 study. It was our first phone conversation, after a flurry of emails, and in speaking to him I realised that he had never been told that the camp was an experiment. I hadn’t expected to lob such a grenade into someone’s life, and after my experience with Milgram’s participants, I understood how troubling this revelation could be.

‘It’s funny,’ Doug said. ‘But my wife, June, and I have been addicted to this TV series called The Fringe, about a group of young people who find out when they are grown up that they were experimented on as children. What do you make of that?’

What did I make of it? It never occurred to me that the children in Sherif’s research hadn’t been told later that they were being studied, and I would be unexpectedly in the situation of having to explain the experiment to Doug and tell him something about the man behind it. I thought of the half-dozen other letters I had sent out across America introducing myself, asking people if they were the same person who attended a camp near Schenectady in upstate New York in 1953. It must have been strange enough to receive a letter like that out of the blue, but it was weirder still to have someone tell you that sixty years ago you were experimented on.

Yet Doug was fascinated. Suddenly his life had a strange twist, an interesting plot point. He told me the end of the story first. ‘I remember my parents coming to get me from a hospital in the Adirondacks. I think it was in a place called Monroe, close to the Canadian border. Would that be right?’

Our roles were reversed. Doug was asking me questions instead of answering mine. So between our initial phone contact, in June 2011, and our first meeting, almost a year later, I went back to that archival material and tried to piece together as much as I could about the 1953 study. But even its exact location was a mystery.

The trouble was that it was a study Sherif clearly preferred to forget. He made reference to the failure of the experiment in the footnote of an early edition of one of his books, and revised this footnote in a later version. Both instances were worded awkwardly, but each told a different story about the failure of the experiment. A 1954 footnote read that the experiment was aborted because of ‘… various difficulties and unfavorable conditions, including errors of judgment in the directing of the experiment’. Two years later, he wrote that ‘in a frustration episode, the subjects attributed the plan to the camp administration’. It was hard to decipher just what he meant in both footnotes. Was the language deliberately unclear? Which was it: the experimenter’s fault or the boys’? I had expected Doug would be able to tell me, but after speaking with him I realised I would have to look further for the answers.

When we met, I showed Doug a copy of the letter Sherif wrote to parents such as his, emblazoned with the monogram of Union College, a prestigious institution that lay claim to being the first non-denominational college in the country. With its suggestion that this was a personal invitation to their son, parents like Doug’s (and especially his mother, according to Doug) may have hoped that this letter would trigger a flow of other invitations — to university gatherings, tennis parties, bridge nights, perhaps even membership of the golf club.

Sixty years later, Doug laughed and shook his head when he read the letter. He sat in the lounge room of his home, not far from Union College, on a nineteenth-century housing estate known as The Plot. The college had originally owned this 30-acre tract of wooded land. In 1898, they sold it for $57,000 to the General Electric Company, who wanted to build a housing estate for its employees. But these weren’t just any homes. And these weren’t ordinary employees. From 1898 to 1927, the company built around one hundred enormous homes in an eclectic mix of styles that it hoped would lure the best research scientists from around the world. Swiss chalets, Tudor homes, Queen Anne–style mansions, and Spanish colonial houses sit back from the street on deep, large blocks, shaded by established gardens. It is said that this geographic patch generated more scientific inventions than just about any other patch in history, as General Electric employees continued their scientific tinkering in their homes and sheds at night, after they got home from work. We’re sitting in a house where the first TV broadcast was received, in 1927.

Science was the lifeblood of Schenectady. In 1951, when Doug and his family moved here, General Electric and Alco, both renowned for their scientific discoveries and contribution to the war effort, were the largest employers in town. Today, the large silver letters General Electric dominate the skyline above the imposing red-brick headquarters on one of the town’s main roads, although the number of employees is dwindling.

Doug peered at the letter again. ‘That letter was the perfect sell!’ he said. ‘Yale, Union College.’ He laughed and slapped his knee. ‘The only thing missing is God and America. What an amazing — I mean, somebody ingenious drafted that letter.’ He passed it across to June.

June started reading the letter half aloud, but Doug kept interrupting. ‘Don’t you love it? Just picture my mother and father getting this.’

‘A grant to Yale, that would have been impressive.’ June’s lips twitched. ‘Oh, the Rockefeller Foundation —’ she said with a laugh.

‘The Rockefellers! Can you see my mother? My twenty-eight-year-old mother reading this? It may as well have come from the President of the United States!’

‘The Rockefeller Foundation,’ June said again.

‘Yeah, from Yale! They mention everything except God and country. Oh,’ Doug shook his head, still laughing, ‘that would have got my mother. She was a sucker for anything fancy. My dad, too. All you had to say was “Union College” in those days. We weren’t allowed on those premises — I never set foot on Union College and yet my father used to revere Union College. Oh, if you were a Union College person, whoa! That was a big deal. So imagine throwing Yale on top of that.’

‘Looks like they had to do some kind of interview,’ June said, scanning to the end.

‘Pfft, not a problem,’ Doug scoffed. ‘My mother grew up dirt poor in the South, but she was smart enough. And my father could have finagled anybody he wanted. My father would have walked into any interview and pulled it off. So they would have handled an interview very well.’ He thought about it for a minute. ‘My dad, who was an extremely patriotic World War II veteran, could have been talked into sending me to something very easily — even though he was a very bright and discerning man — if he thought it was going to be advancing some patriotic concept. We’re gonna help figure out how we can make kids like your son be leaders: that would have appealed to his sense of patriotism. My mother, who came from a very poor background, would have been persuaded if she thought that she or the family would somehow be elevated by my attendance. But my parents were very protective. My mother — I wasn’t leaving her side unless it was for something that she thought was wonderful for me, and it would have been pretty much the same for my father, except his view would have been, Okay, you can go if it’s gonna toughen you up a little bit. Until I was about seventeen I was always the smallest kid in my class.

‘But here’s the part that still is gonna trouble me and trouble me. It’s three weeks — that’s a long time for a kid to be in a situation like that. My mother — that would have been a very long time for her too.’ He turned to June. ‘Can you see my mother saying go off to the woods for three weeks?’

‘No,’ June said, shaking her head.

‘She was bamboozled.’ He leaned over and looked at the letter on June’s lap. ‘It doesn’t say anything about the parents not coming up to visit. At every other camp I was ever on, every weekend the parents were there. Not only did they deliver you and pick you up, they came up for events.’ He shook his head. ‘Three weeks!’

Doug Griset, long-standing judge at the Schenectady County Family Court, put on his robes each day and entered the theatre that was the courtroom, the drama of family dysfunction played out daily in front of his bench. So good was he at the role that he was cast as a judge in The Place Beyond the Pines, a gritty movie about a carnival drifter who washes up in Schenectady, which starred Ryan Gosling.

Doug was used to playing roles. But what he didn’t know until he got my email was that it had begun in childhood, when he was cast in a role not of his choosing and without his consent. He was curious enough that when I suggested I call in to visit on my way back from a conference in Montreal in 2012, he suggested we could take a road trip to see if we could find the camp, and I jumped at the chance. I hoped that on the journey more of Doug’s memories would surface, and I could make a connection between the scant detail provided by Sherif and his colleagues and Doug’s personal recollections. I hoped it would prompt Doug to recover more of his camp experience.

I arrived in Albany, about half an hour from Schenectady, by bus. At the Greyhound terminal, Doug was easy to spot. In an artfully rumpled linen jacket, he looked coolly crisp among the people sprawled on seats, fanning themselves in the heat.

In Doug’s car he spread out a map of upstate New York on the dashboard. Doug had been sceptical when I told him the camp I was looking for was in Middle Grove because it was only an hour away from Schenectady. ‘I’m amazed because in my mind it was a thousand million miles away. It’s like my dog when we go to our lake house, which is two hundred miles away. He sleeps most of the way because in his mind it’s five thousand miles away and takes a hundred hours to get there.’ He smoothed out the map. ‘Now, I’m going to have to be a little careful here …’

The conversation in the car went mostly this way: staccato reflections and reminiscences interrupted by street directions.

‘Here’s where we’re going.’ When we got closer to the area, he pulled out some pages printed from Google Maps and smoothed them flat on the dashboard for me to see. He had his finger on a spot not far from Saratoga Springs. The indicator ticked as I looked at the map, not sure, now that I was here, what exactly I hoped we’d find. We had jokingly called this a road trip and, anticipating only Doug’s memory as a guide, I had expected to find myself deep in the Adirondacks, probably lost, the outing fruitless yet enjoyable, an opportunity to talk and hear his story more than anything else.

We took three wrong turns on our way out of Saratoga. At the edge of town, Doug pulled over and went into a garage to ask directions. I wondered at the fact that we were geographically so close, but Middle Grove seemed hard to find.

When we found Middle Grove — not much more than a crossroad and a general store — we meandered. We followed minor roads up green hills and down, passed horse studs, dairy farms, and mansions set back from farm picket fences with sweeping gravel drives. We scrutinised signs.

We stopped at a gas station, but it was closed. Then we stopped at a store selling candy, a low, gloomy place where a woman emerged from the shadows and shook her head when Doug started his story. To an outsider, it sounded strange. He began by telling people how I’d come all the way from Australia and that we were looking for a camp that was run during the 1950s. Even to someone logical and trusting, it sounded like a cockamamie story. A camp, a group of boys, an experiment. It surprised me that people wanted to help us at all.

We passed Boy Haven, a summer camp for boys, but it wasn’t the place. We got excited when we saw a sign for Camp Wood, thinking this might be it, yet were disappointed when we couldn’t find an entrance. Then, after seeing three more signs for the camp of the same name, we realised they were referring to kindling for campfires. Finally, on a back road which I later found out was called Lake Desolation Road, we passed a single building: the Middle Grove post office.

Inside, Doug explained our story to the postmistress and I smiled and nodded in the background, convinced after two hours of driving around that this was a wild-goose chase. When Doug mentioned the camp and the experiment on the boys, she asked, ‘Were you one of the boys?’

‘Yes,’ he said, but perhaps he saw something in her face because he hurried on. ‘I’m all right. Nothing bad happened.’

Two customers at a bench in the corner behind us, wrapping up parcels, looked up at the exchange. ‘Hang on,’ one of the women said. ‘I’ll call my dad. He’s ninety-five and has lived here all his life. He might know.’

Five minutes later, we were following her car out of the car park. Doug said, ‘Okay, we may have hit a jackpot. We’ll see. I’m still cautious.’ But I could sense his excitement.

Two miles from the post office we turned up a dirt road, then off an even smaller track that curved in and out of tall stands of forest. Was this looking at all familiar to Doug, I wondered. But I could tell he wasn’t thinking that far ahead. This was an adventure, and the thing with adventures is that you never know which way they will turn out.

At the top of a hill she slowed and pulled off to the side of the road, and Doug did the same. ‘We would never have found this spot ourselves,’ Doug said. We’d stopped at a fence facing a wooded area. A truck was parked beside a wooden shack, and a couple of cars were beside it.

‘I see a guy with a dog up ahead, so we’re going to get out, but we’re gonna be real careful, right?’

A menacing dog ran towards the gate, and I noticed that a man in a flannel shirt stood on the porch, staring at us.

After a minute the man approached the fence cautiously, but made no move to call off the dog. The woman from the post office approached with Doug and told the man her father recalled a summer camp on this land in the 1950s. I waited by the car. Doug’s comment about being careful reminded me how many people owned guns and might be suspicious of strangers. Then Doug started talking, telling our story. I moved towards the fence, and the dog reared up again, barking protectively.

The screen door slapped, and a woman in her twenties, in shorts and a t-shirt, with long dark hair, stepped off the porch. Her white legs flashed against the greenery as she made her way to the fence to listen.

The sun was dappled by the thick trees. A mosquito buzzed by my ear. After a moment, the man opened the gate and Doug waited for me to catch up before we stepped through.

I felt suddenly nervous. Doug’s comment, reinforcing that we were strangers here, was right. We were strangers in this muggy green patch of forest at the top of the hill. The man didn’t seem to know anything about a camp and didn’t have much to say. The girl was also silent, watching from the fence line.

Doug had pulled out his business card, and was telling the man and the girl who he was. He was used to putting people at ease. Meanwhile I looked around. The narrow piece of land was small, the wooden house close to the road. It seemed impossible this was the isolated campsite Sherif had described.

The whole enterprise, our cautious excitement in the car, began to seem ridiculous. I was wasting everyone’s time: Doug’s, these locals’, the women in the post office, the ninety-five-year-old father who seemed to remember the camp. But Doug had stopped talking and was staring at the house. ‘That chimney,’ he said to the man, ‘is it inside the house, too?’ Then almost straightaway, he continued, ‘I remember a chimney, a stone chimney, with a big lintel where they displayed the prizes us boys would win.’

The girl invited us in and we stepped into a living room that opened off the porch. Doug pointed at the wall. ‘That’s it. They kept a barometer thing up there, with the scores of both teams in red and the prizes, these big jackknives that they paraded around. Every day we looked at how we were doing and we looked at those prizes. I wanted that knife so badly.’ He shook his head. ‘I can’t believe how badly I wanted that knife.’

The girl asked Doug who ran the camp and he told her Muzafer Sherif, with the support of Yale and the Rockefeller Foundation. She wrote down Sherif’s name on the back of his business card, Doug spelling it out for her.

I asked the man if he’d mind if I took some photos. ‘Go ahead,’ he said gruffly, and I stepped outside to the porch. From this vantage I could see the yard went back quite a way, ending at the edge of a forest of dark trees.

I snapped a few quick photos of the house and the land. Then I stood on the top of the rise and looked down the gully, where the land dropped away. A small wooden hut was half hidden in the trees. Doug came over and looked, too.

‘It’s an old outhouse,’ the man said.

Doug nodded. ‘A double outhouse, huh,’ he said, and he sounded as if he wasn’t guessing. As if he knew the building too.

Below the outhouse, a wire fence was just visible in a tangle of bushes at the bottom of the hill, but if I half closed my eyes I could ignore the fence and see the site as part of a much larger property, accessible from a bumpy, unmade track.

Inside the house a kettle whistled and the girl abruptly switched it off. The man was hovering. We were holding them up. Neither he nor the girl could tell us anything about the history of their home. Doug had fallen silent, as if he’d come to the same realisation as me. There was no dramatic revelation to be had here. This place was not going to give up its secrets.

‘She’s in there googling Muzafer Sherif right now,’ Doug said with a laugh as we pulled away. It had all happened so quickly that neither of us could quite believe how easy it had been, and as we drove we went over and over the sequence of events. What were the chances of being in the post office at the same time as the customer whose father remembered the site of the old camp? Wasn’t it amazing that she had gotten in her car and taken us there? Doug was bowled over by how helpful people had been. I was still processing what we’d seen, but was increasingly sure we had found the right place. Despite the changes to the house, how incredible that Doug recognised the stone chimney as the mess hall where the boys had gathered at mealtimes. But Doug, like the judge he was, remained cautious. Yes, he recognised the stone chimney. Yes, he remembered the outhouse. Yes, it looked like it could have been the place. ‘I know you want me to say it was,’ he said, ‘but I can’t do that.’

Yet this trip had set something in motion in both of us, and raised more questions for Doug than I had answers for. What had his parents been told exactly, he wondered. Who were the men behind this experiment, and what had they been trying to prove? How much had parents such as his known about what they were sending their sons away to do? How exactly was he experimented on? Did he carry within him some hidden, unconscious legacy from the experiment, or was it just a couple of dimly remembered weeks of holiday?

I felt guilty, grubby, for stirring up these questions and having inadvertently started a process whereby Doug began to re-examine his life in view of this new information.

By the time we got back to Schenectady later that afternoon and he recounted the day’s events to June, I knew that our discovery of the site of Sherif’s mysterious footnote, instead of putting something to rest, was just the beginning. And I felt I owed it to Doug to find some answers.