4

The Watchers

The cabins and the mess hall were surrounded by long grass when Marvin Sussman first visited the campsite in early June 1953. The Camp Fire Girls, the Girl Scout–like group that owned the property, hadn’t used the place for a while and it felt abandoned, the small cabins hunched in the shadow of the woods. But Sussman was getting desperate: so many local campsites had already been booked out that he didn’t have much choice.

Later in life, Sussman would usually wear tinted aviator glasses and a Stetson hat, but in 1953 he was clean-cut, with heavy black glasses and a plump, boyish face. He was one of five men Sherif had employed as part of his research team that summer, and it was his job to get things ready before the others arrived, recruiting staff, choosing subjects, and making sure the campsite was up and running. He’d worked with Sherif before, in the 1949 study — the one that took place in Litchfield Hills in Connecticut, where Sherif engineered conflict between two groups and had difficulty eradicating it, the one that gave Sherif the idea to look at ways to engineer peace between hostile groups — and found him an inspiring figure. In that study, Sussman had been a participant observer: a person who pretended to be a camp counsellor but whose real job was to surreptitiously watch and make notes on what the boys said and did. But this was a much bigger undertaking, with more responsibility, more funding, more staff, and more pressure. And even though Sussman had sought out the job with Sherif, he was beginning to feel the full weight of it.

He wiggled the key in the padlock and the hinge groaned when he pushed the door open. Inside, the mess hall would have smelt damp and musty, and I could imagine Sussman propping the door open with a block of wood and taking a moment to fill his pipe and light it, clamping it in his teeth as he stepped inside and looked around. Since he last worked for Sherif, he’d completed his PhD and now had his first academic job, at Union College in Schenectady, but he felt unappreciated there and was desperate to get out of the place. This study was his chance.

Sherif took Sussman on because he was a hard worker who could organise the practical details. When they met, Sussman was a Yale graduate student who worked eighteen- to twenty-hour days supporting a young family. As well as studying full-time, he worked part-time as a research assistant, worked nights at a diner, and took in extra work helping out in his father’s business in watch and clock repair. When Sherif offered him the job of research collaborator for his upcoming summer research, and co-authorship on a book about it, Sussman jumped at the chance. Sherif, a leading figure in social psychology, with influential connections, was giving him a boost up the academic ladder, a way out of a small college to a bigger city, a better job.

Sussman started working for Sherif in May 1953, and with the experiment planned to begin at the end of June, he threw himself into the detail of arrangements. His job was to be on the ground, organising the logistics under the approval of Sherif, who was down in Oklahoma. It might have sounded straightforward enough, but Sherif could be an infuriating boss, prevaricating on major decisions and micromanaging small ones. While he promptly fired the camp nurse Sussman had hired because she was too pretty and likely to be a distraction to the men, Sherif delayed giving the go-ahead on booking a campsite. With just four weeks before the experiment was due to start, they had no campsite booked, and without a location for the experiment or a confirmed date, Sussman was unable to recruit staff or select subjects.

By the time Sherif agreed on a site, most of the families Sussman had contacted had already signed their sons up for summer camp. They moved the camp date forward so that Sussman had more time to complete arrangements. His letters to Sherif in the weeks preceding the camp were increasingly plaintive; he was worried that so much of his time was being squandered on mundane organisational tasks rather than on developing the theoretical framework for their book. Sherif’s wife, Carolyn, urged her husband to put himself in Sussman’s shoes to understand his frustration. ‘You must be able to imagine how dreadful it must be to be stuck in a little one-horse college with 3 children where no stimulation or accomplishment is possible and with just enough to make out on …’ But Sherif was unsympathetic. This kind of hard work was the price of groundbreaking research, he wrote to Sussman, calling the task ‘Herculean’ but reassuring him that he had the sort of spirit needed to ‘succeed in this “frontier” attempt’.

For Sussman, perhaps this demanding and often frustrating supervision was the price of working with a genius. He persisted, and by mid-July, after contacting fifty-three local ministers and thirty-five school principals, and cold-calling two hundred and twelve parents, Sussman had twenty-four boys signed up.

The six members of the research team who converged on the campsite on 18 July 1953 hit the ground running. With just five days before the boys arrived, the men were up early each morning and finished late at night. Even if there’d been time for long walks in the woods or swimming in the lake, Sherif would never have allowed it. Renowned for a ferocious work ethic, he expected nothing less from his staff.

By day, amid sounds of sawing and hammering, as workmen connected electricity, gas, and phone; installed plumbing for running water; and drained and repaired the dam so it could be used for swimming, Herb Kelman sat inside the stuffy cabin the staff had commandeered as an office, typing furiously. Sherif had invited the twenty-six-year-old he’d met at Yale to be research consultant, the scientific conscience of the study, ensuring that the men were rigorous and objective in their approach. I had never heard of someone being invited into a research to play this kind of role before, and it seemed to be an innovation of Sherif’s. Kelman was already making his name as pacifist who urged his fellow psychologists to apply their expertise and the discipline of science to advance the psychology of peace, not war. His role in the experiment was to develop scientific standards for the experiment and, as a roving observer, ensure the men kept to them.

But Sherif and Sussman had to do more than demonstrate their objectivity in their observations of the boys to prove the experiment was a success. They needed measuring devices to gauge the amount of trust and loyalty between the boys. This was to be the PhD research project for OJ Harvey and Jack White, two of Sherif’s graduate students from Oklahoma. They spent most of the five days stripped to the waist, hammering and sawing in the shade of the mess hall, constructing a ballgame and target board that would act as a friendship-measuring device.

The sixth man was Jim Carper, who Herb Kelman had recommended when Sherif was looking for another observer. Carper had plenty of practical skills developed from working in conscientious objector camps during the war, and during those five days he helped out the others, mowing grass and chopping wood in preparation for the arrival of the boys.

It seems an idyllic portrait, six men working alongside one another to prepare the scene for one of the most complex and daring field experiments of the era. Yet, much as they would with the two groups of boys, tensions were already brewing between the experimental team. Sherif’s letters in the months leading up to this time were full of dread and foreboding, and he seemed unable to trust Sussman to do a good job. He was convinced that this research was the most challenging and important project he had ever embarked on, and securing a huge grant for it — $38,000 from the Rockefeller Foundation — seemed another testament to its merit. The grant was one of eight the Foundation funded, and surpassed the American Museum of Natural History’s study of community life on Manus Island, led by Margaret Mead. Yet instead of filling him with confidence, the grant seemed to have done the opposite. In March 1953, he had written to his mentor, Carl Hovland, that the experiment ‘is such a huge job that the burden of responsibility for doing justice to it is weighing heavily on me’. Perhaps Sussman, as the leading man on the ground, was the recipient of Sherif’s anxiety.

In contrast to his rather gloomy letters to Sussman, there’s a kind of longing in Sherif’s letters to his graduate student and research assistant OJ Harvey as they negotiate how soon Harvey will be able to join the team, with Sherif urging him to hurry and get there as soon as he can. I imagine when Harvey’s blue 1949 Plymouth rumbled into camp after the long drive from Oklahoma that Sherif rushed out to greet him and Jack White, before immediately setting them to work.

On Kelman’s advice, Sherif had divided the six men into the research team and the operational team, kept physically separate and housed in different cabins to guard against bias. The research team, with Sherif as director, included Kelman, Sussman, and OJ Harvey. They had a small, two-storey cabin to themselves, plus a tent in the birch grove, particularly for Sherif’s use. The two participant observers, Jim Carper and Jack White, who would spend most of their time with the boys, shared a cabin of their own.

For those five days, from 18 to 22 July, before the camp began, the six men worked on their roles. Two would pretend to be caretakers, two would be camp counsellors, two would be camp managers. They memorised the main hypotheses for each stage: that groups would develop their own identity and sense of belonging during the first stage, that each group would develop negative attitudes towards their rivals during the competition phase, and that group friction and boundaries would dissolve when the groups faced a problem that required them to cooperate to find a solution — a forest fire that threatened the camp — in the final stage. The men also practised and tested their observational skills and perfected their disguises, taking turns in snapping group photos with the new cameras Sussman had bought to record the experiment. The suave-looking Sherif of earlier photos I’d seen had been replaced by a rather portly middle-aged man wearing a rumpled grey janitor’s uniform. His wife, Carolyn, a budding social psychologist herself, who did all sorts of behind-the-scenes work for Sherif, including co-writing books and journal articles and soothing his professional anxieties, likely chose the outfit for him.

It’s hard not to read something into the photos the men took of themselves in the days before the experiment began. I noticed how the only photo of Sherif in which he looks relaxed is the one where he stands between his two graduate students from Oklahoma. His hands in his back pockets, smiling around a cigarette hanging from his lip, Sherif is half turned to a handsome young Billy Jack White, or Jack, as he was known, who wears a tight white t-shirt and an army cap pulled down to shade his face. With his olive skin and his sleek black hair, Jack White reminded me of one of the Italian boys from West Side Story. He looks as though he is telling Sherif a joke or a funny story, a cigarette pinched between his fingers and half raised to his mouth. On the edge of the photo, with his back to them but facing the camera, OJ Harvey smiles along as if he is anticipating the punchline, his hands on his hips and his eyes on the horizon. OJ’s brown hair, Brylcreemed in a series of sculpted waves, makes him look dependable, someone you can rely on when things get rocky.

The men that stand beside him in the photos were Sherif’s bulwark against failure, each of them chosen to play a particular role, all of them at the start of their careers, unlike forty-seven-year-old Sherif. In one photo, Marvin Sussman, with his fleshy face and round glasses, a baseball cap tipped back on his head and swinging a box brownie from one hand, looks like a dad about to head off to a baseball game. On the other side of Sherif stands Herbert Kelman, wearing a plaid shirt and a leather cap, the brim pulled low over his heavy black glasses. With the stubble of a black beard coming in, he looks swarthy and slightly disreputable. The plan was that Sherif and Kelman, posing as caretakers and shuffling about the campsite picking up rubbish, raking leaves, or chopping wood, would be able to move freely from group to group, boy to boy, making observations and ‘asking naïve questions’, supposedly without drawing attention to themselves. But Sherif, if not Kelman, had been seriously miscast. He had grown up with servants and had never been a handyman, had never used a screwdriver or fixed a squeaky door.

I had already encountered a Harvard professor called Herbert Kelman whose work on ethics I had come across in my research on Stanley Milgram. But as hard as I looked online, in his lengthy curriculum vitae and in interviews about his life and work, Kelman made no mention of working with Muzafer Sherif. I was intrigued.

‘That’s me,’ Herb Kelman said when I showed him the photo of the group of men, pointing at the rather shady-looking character with the leather cap and the dark stubble. ‘I decided not to shave for the duration of the camp.’ With his white hair swept back from a bald pate, Kelman didn’t look anything like the man in the 1953 photo, except that he wore the same kind of heavy-framed black glasses. ‘I was known as Mr Herbee, a handyman,’ he said with a chuckle.

Two years before that photo was taken, in 1951, Kelman, a graduate student at Yale, had been ‘very excited’ to hear that Muzafer Sherif would be visiting the university. He’d been a big admirer of Sherif’s work. Despite the age difference — Sherif was almost twice Kelman’s age — the two hit it off. Sherif had just finished his first 1949 study, where he had brought two groups to conflict, and, when they met, Sherif was developing a theory for the next stage: how to bring about peace. ‘I liked his work very much — he was beginning to develop his theory of conflict and moving from hostility to harmony. His general approach was to look not at individuals but at the relationships between groups of people and the social context in which violence and hostility occurs.’

Kelman’s interest in peace research was personal. As an eleven-year-old in Vienna, he had witnessed the arrival of Nazi troops after the Anschluss and the horror of Kristallnacht before he and his family fled to America. Sherif had asked Kelman for feedback on a chapter he had been writing, and Kelman noticed how insistent Sherif was that conflict and war was not the result of human nature, of a person’s authoritarian upbringing, or of frustration in early childhood. ‘He spent an awful lot of time in his writing tearing down other approaches, particularly psychoanalytic explanations of groups and group behaviour. And I tried to tell him, “Why do you do that? It isn’t really necessary. You don’t have to tear other theories down in order to come in with your own. You could say yes, here are other theories, they have their limitations, this approach is an attempt to deal with those limitations.” So I stress this because it became an issue in the later work. He had a fatal flaw. He could never admit when he was wrong.’ But Sherif admired Kelman’s frankness and invited him along as a kind of safeguard against scientific bias.

As Kelman would soon learn, for Sherif, inviting advice would prove much easier than acting on it.

Nine boys stood in a ragged line in a clearing, holding their bows and arrows. An impatient queue of six other boys watched from the sidelines, waiting for their turn. Peter Blake held his bow expertly, and was trying to get the others’ attention, calling out loudly to watch how he did it. Almost thirteen, Peter was small for his age, but he had the easy confidence of a boy who was used to being in charge. He stood with one hand on his jutted hip, frowning impatiently. Some boys were shooting already, others were still trying to get their arrows correctly in the bow. Peter called that they should do it all at the same time.

It was the first day of the camp, the first time Doug, a slight, sandy-haired eleven-year-old, had held a bow and arrow. He told me how he loved archery: and what boy wouldn’t? It was a thrill to feel the tautness of the bowstring when he pulled the arrow back, the tingling anticipation of letting the arrow fly, even when it fell short and hit the ground instead of the target. I can picture him waiting patiently with the others on the sidelines until it was his turn again. He loved the danger of it. When he went back home after the camp, he pestered his parents to be able to practise archery in the backyard. But their answer was an emphatic no.

Peter lifted his bow and inserted an arrow. ‘Ready,’ he called and squinted along the arrow, aiming it at the target ten metres away. ‘Aim!’

Just then, a smaller boy darted out in front of the line to retrieve his arrow from where it had fallen short of the target and lay in the grass. Another boy let his arrow go and it whizzed towards the target. Peter stamped his foot. ‘Hey!’ he yelled angrily. He spotted Jim Carper, a camp counsellor, lounging against a tree by the edge of the woods, smoking a cigarette. ‘Jim!’ Peter appealed to Carper. ‘Can you call the commands?’

Twenty-eight-year-old Carper, with the quiff of dark hair that flopped onto his forehead, James–Dean style, called back, ‘You’re doing fine!’ and gave Peter a lazy thumbs-up.

Peter made an exasperated noise and turned away.

Beneath his casual pose, Carper was watching intently, memorising the scene so he could write it all down later. He described this exchange in his daily observation notes as proof for his new boss Muzafer Sherif that he was fulfilling his role as disinterested observer. Carper was the only one of the research team who hadn’t met Sherif before the experiment, and I imagine that at the same time as he was trying to get the measure of the man, he was eager to prove he would do a good job. I don’t know if it was money or idealism that brought Carper to this camp — or if it was the chance to work with a renowned social psychologist — but he had had enough of the rat psychology he had been studying at John Hopkins. After the sour smell of the animal laboratory, the warm Adirondack air, cut with the smell of mown grass, would have been invigorating.

Today, the boys had free run of the campsite, and it was the job of the six men disguised as camp staff to watch them mingling and playing and make note of who was making friends with whom. But reading Carper’s description of the chaos and exuberance of the archery range on the first day at Camp Talualac, it’s impossible not to feel worried for the boys’ safety and sympathy for frustrated Peter Blake. In his attention to observing detail, Carper seemed oblivious to danger.

The boys’ over-exuberance in the archery session was a release of pent-up energy. It had been raining most of the day and they’d been stuck indoors. The rain had started just before the bus had pulled off the muddy dirt road and into the camp, and there’d been a scramble to get their bags off the bus and into the mess hall without getting drenched.

Doug waited his turn, watching the boys around him fooling around, shouting encouragement, and boasting about how they’d hit the bullseye. He would have felt puny in comparison. He was a ‘dweeby’ kid, he told me, who looked younger than eleven — a fact his father, who had fought during the war and now ran a pharmacy in Schenectady, was always trying to help him compensate for. He made Doug wear an oversized coat in the schoolyard to help him look bigger and gave him boxing lessons. But Doug had already intuited that physical size wasn’t what got you respect in the schoolyard. It was personality. So he didn’t boast as he waited his turn, didn’t brag like some of the others about how close he got to the bullseye.

It had seemed like a long trip to eleven-year-old Walt Burkhard. Then again, a trip to Schenectady, to go to the library with his mother, from their small village of Alplaus seemed like a big deal too. Schenectady felt like a ‘metropolis’ compared to Alplaus, which had just a post office, a garage, a general store, and a tiny four-roomed schoolhouse. But Walt was shocked by how isolated this camp was. There was no town nearby: they were right out in the woods with just a big dark mess hall and five drab cabins, surrounded by thick woods overgrown with vines that draped from the trees like cobwebs. It was the first time he’d been away with a group of people he didn’t know. And in a small place like Alplaus, Walt was used to knowing everyone.

After a welcome by the camp director, an introduction to the staff, and an inspection by the nurse, the boys were encouraged to claim one of the twenty-four beds that had been set up at one end of the mess hall and unpack.

The wet weather might have ruined Sherif’s plans for the day’s activities, but it was a stroke of luck for those boys who felt far from home. With twenty-four children and ten adults inside and the rain falling steadily outside, the large room was warm, crowded, and cosy.

Walt and Doug quickly made new friends. Doug found a buddy in John Wilkinson, who on the bus had impressed them all by knowing at a glance the make and model of every car they passed. That wet afternoon, John and Doug lay on their bunks, reading comic books together. Walt overcame his shyness and joined in a game of cops and robbers after a serious-looking boy in glasses called Irving asked him to play, and a group of them ran around the mess hall, using sticks as guns, while around them other boys wrote letters home, or played Parcheesi or Crazy Eights. Meanwhile, Harold McDonough, a boy with an interest in all things scientific, sat alone, and I imagine him reading a copy of Popular Mechanics, with its offers of correspondence courses in industrial electricity, build-your-own power mower kits and crystal radio sets. He kept himself to himself. He was the kind of boy with an interest in how things worked and expected adults to be able to explain things and answer his questions. Except that he noticed that the adults here had trouble explaining things. When he asked Jim Carper that first morning what the microphones in the rafters in the mess hall were for, Carper stammered and said they were there for when Mr Ness made camp announcements. But they were microphones, Harold pointed out, not loudspeakers. Jim just looked uncomfortable and hurried away.

In the kitchen, divided from the main room by a partition, the cook and his helper fried chicken croquettes, hash browns, and buttered carrots, and boiled green beans for lunch. The air was steamy and fugged with food smells, the heat of warm bodies, and the men’s cigarette smoke.

After lunch, one of the counsellors brought out his mandolin, and two boys — Eric on the accordion and Irving on the ukulele — joined in to play ‘On Top of Old Smokey’. Irving’s shoulders hunched, and his glasses slipped closer and closer to the end of his nose as he stared intently at his hands as he played, so determined to get it right that he forgot to sing. Eric played enthusiastically, not noticing or not caring that he was playing out of tune. A boy named Laurence joined in, substituting the lyrics to ‘On Top of Spaghetti’ and waving his arms to get the others to collaborate.

By mid afternoon, the rain had cleared and the boys headed out to the archery range. A hot breeze dried what was left of the muddy puddles. Irving was having trouble with archery. The humid air fogged up his glasses, so it was hard for him to see the target. Despite never being able to hit the target, and despite the urging of some of the boys for him to give up his turn, Irving persisted, lining up again and again but never getting any closer to the bullseye. At supper, he saved Walt a seat beside him. After supper, John and Doug sat on the jetty and John showed off his knowledge of fishing to his new friend, demonstrating to Doug how to bait a hook before casting the line out into the stream. They fished together until it got dark.

It was hard for the boys to sleep that night, even though it had been a full day. There was a lot of giggling and excited talk after lights out. Although some were quiet, trying not to think about home, others bragged about their exploits in archery, and a few told knock-knock jokes or shouted mock insults in the dark. But soon one of the camp counsellors came in and told them to settle down. Gradually the talk died, as one by one the children fell asleep. Jim Carper, listening at the door, noted what time it was when the room went quiet and the last boy had gone to sleep.

The next morning the sky was clear, the puddles had almost disappeared, and the only evidence of rain was the mosquitoes swarming in the shade of the trees at the edge of the clearing. After a breakfast of ham and scrambled eggs, Marvin Sussman rounded everyone up outside the mess hall to take some group photos.

Sussman was the only adult the boys had met before. He had visited their homes to talk to their parents about the camp. I imagine they lined up eagerly and followed Sussman’s directions: taller boys in the back row, the front row seated cross-legged on the grass. They were a neat, well dressed bunch. Most of them looked as though they had had their hair cut for camp, and wore bright striped t-shirts, or neat checked shirts tucked into jeans. Many looked relaxed, expectant. Some looked shy. You wouldn’t know, looking at the photo, that just the day before they were strangers.

But like everything at this camp, the photos had another purpose. Once they were processed, Muzafer Sherif pinned the group portraits to the wall of their small office so the men could more easily memorise the faces and names of their subjects.

After the photos, the boys raced towards the archery range, while those who missed out played games of Horseshoes while they waited for their turn. Even though they had only been at camp a short time, the boys were already forming strong connections. Sherif predicted that the boys would make friends during this first stage, and the observers’ job on the first day was to record ‘emerging friendships’. But it seemed from the documentary evidence that there was nothing fledgling about the camaraderie that was developing between the boys. I wondered if they unconsciously understood that there was something different about this summer camp, if it was a reaction to adults who did so little to organise them and yet seemed ever present and strangely watchful that the boys instinctively bonded.

For the boys, the second day of camp seemed an extension of the first. At the archery range, new buddies Peter and Laurence had established a system and set up rules, and the rest of the boys seemed happy to follow their lead. They made a good team: Peter, with his bossy and rather serious manner, kept order, and stocky Laurence, the comic, with his gift for funny faces and knock-knock jokes, entertained the others while they waited their turn. The boys now formed a straight line and fired in unison and only on command.

That afternoon, the campers went spontaneously from one activity to the other, unfettered by adult intervention. The boys believed the camp was run by Harry Ness, an emaciated man with a mournful face who wore small shorts that exposed startlingly long pale legs. Ness carried a clipboard and wore a whistle around his neck, and it was he who announced the day’s activities and gave instructions to the two junior counsellors, students at Union College, Ken Pirro and Rupe Huse, who spent most of the day with the boys, supervising activities, supplying equipment, and generally making sure things ran smoothly. Then there were Jim Carper and Jack White, introduced as the senior counsellors, who also spent most of their day around the boys. But in the shadow camp, Ness and his team were puppets whose every announcement, every move, was dictated and choreographed by Muzafer Sherif, whose plans Sussman passed on to Ness and the others each morning before breakfast.

Sherif’s strategy was for the boys to pass through four stages. The first stage was mingling and making friends, or ‘spontaneous group formation’, and it would last just a day or two. In the second stage, ‘intragroup relations’, the boys would be separated into two groups and each group given a chance to develop its own identity. In stage three, ‘intergroup relations’, the groups would take part in a series of competitions that would cause hostility and conflict between them. Stage four was the ‘integration phase’, where the two groups would come together in the face of a larger, shared problem. The hostility and competition between the groups would vanish, and they would regroup as a harmonious whole. That was the plan.

At every stage in these first days, watchers such as Carper were on hand, observing, writing notes, and recording on film and audiotape when they could. But how do you transform the jostling, noisy, and chaotic interactions between groups of children into a set of scientific observations and data that others will understand? How do you show that the hunches you have are borne out by your observations?

In the five days before the experiment started, Herb Kelman hammered out three drafts of detailed instructions on his portable typewriter, and they are an eye-glazing read. As well as a staff policy that included a rule of no drinking, Kelman wrote five densely typed pages of advice for the participant observers in how to maintain a hands-off approach. ‘Since the observers are familiar with the hypotheses, they may tend to expect certain kinds of behavior … and may be selectively perceptive … They should try in every way possible to counteract this tendency …’ The instructions were full of warnings about what not to do. Page one told them, ‘Nobody is to be a leader to the boys.’ Staff were to remain low-key and were not to distinguish themselves in any way that might detract from the boys’ relationships with one another: ‘We do not want boys to develop attachments to certain staff members …’ They were not to influence the behaviour of the boys in any way, and in particular not to usurp the role of the groups’ natural leaders. To this end, staff were not to make suggestions, question the boys, display special talents, form attachments, or wear insignia. Instead they were to be unobtrusive observers, taking photos and movie film covertly, memorising their observations so that later, when they could get away from the group, they could write notes without arousing suspicion.

In addition, the counsellors were not try to ‘influence’ campers, were not to take initiative ‘in introducing activities’, and were not to ‘counsel campers’. They were also not to initiate anything without the direction from research staff. ‘It is better to do nothing than to begin a course of action which may prove deleterious to the operations of the study,’ the booklet makes clear. Kelman also warned that the research team would be watching to make sure they complied. They were reminded, too, that the camp could well take an unexpected turn, but that no matter how strange, ‘Be assured … that it is done with the best judgement regarding the success of the project and the participants.’

But reading these instructions, I was struck by what they didn’t say. How, in practical terms, could the counsellors implement these directives given they were the ones supervising activities and spending all their time with the boys? It seemed an impossible ask.

On the first day of camp, the researchers’ goal had been simply to record friendships, such as Peter and Laurence’s, and Walt and Irving’s. On the second day, they were preoccupied with assessing the boys’ skills in a range of activities so that later, when the boys were split into groups, the two sides would be equally matched. But the men seemed to have underestimated or perhaps didn’t notice just the strength of the bonds developing between the boys.

Walt had no idea that he and his friends were being studied — he didn’t notice anyone observing them or taking notes. Initially the camp was just as he imagined a normal summer camp would be, although that afternoon none of the adults comforted a boy who had the ‘sniffles’ when it came to swimming, and no one encouraged a quiet boy called Tony who seemed ‘reluctant to mix’.

As the second day wore on, it became clear to Sherif as he roamed the camp, dressed in a janitor’s uniform, that assessing the twenty-four boys spread out across the woods and grounds was too difficult. I pictured Sherif prowling the campsite pretending to pick up litter, watching with irritation at what he would have viewed as aimless activity as the boys — some in groups of two or three, others on their own — drifted from one pastime to another: tinkering at an old piano outside the mess hall, shooting arrows, playing badminton, and tossing horseshoes. He decided they had to change plans. The only way to successfully differentiate and compare the boys was by getting them in the same place at the same time to play a game.

After lunch, when Ness suggested a soccer game, the boys ‘rejected’ this. Fifteen minutes later, the junior counsellors ‘forcefully’ rounded the reluctant boys up for a game of volleyball, although four boys still refused to play. With Ness as umpire, the six observers watched from different vantage points on the sidelines, ready to rate each boy in terms of size, sporting ability, and leadership potential in games. But it was sweltering in the sun; the boys were tired from the morning’s activities and ‘unenthusiastic’ about playing. Next, Ness announced a game of softball and took the boys to the baseball field, but when they got there the boys again refused. Finally, most of the boys agreed to a game of prisoner’s base, but it soon degenerated into ‘general apathy and chaos’. Carper wrote that Ness’ instructions for how to play were confused, and once play did start, ‘many of the captured prisoners accepted their incarceration as an opportunity to sit down and do nothing’, and were not interested in being rescued. Teammates such as John and Doug sat in the shade and read comics while Harold ‘went hiking in the woods, alone’. Eventually the men gave up and the boys wandered off to swim, play badminton, and practise with the bows and arrows. I can imagine Sherif’s irritation that such a seemingly straightforward exercise in observation had proved so difficult, and his unhappiness with the men’s inability to inspire the boys to play. But the afternoon had highlighted a weakness in the researchers’ view of their subjects. The boys were not passive pawns, and their cooperation was crucial to the experiment’s success.

The second day of camp ended happily for the children. Around a campfire, they took turns in telling ghost stories and, later, joined in a sing-a-long. The whole group sang ‘Hail, Hail, The Gang’s All Here’, but Herb Kelman later wrote in his notes that they all ‘balked’ at singing the word ‘hell’ in the line ‘What the hell do we care’ because it was a curse word.

By eight o’clock, the campers were in bed and settled. If any of them had stayed awake after the others had fallen asleep, if they’d listened hard, they might have heard above the steady click of crickets the tap-tap-tap of typewriters coming from a cabin on the other side of the birch grove as the two watchers typed out their observations of the day. Side by side, Jim Carper and Jack White typed without speaking, forbidden from discussing their view of the day’s events with each other — their fingers flying faster as the time neared 10.30 pm, when they were scheduled to present their observations to Muzafer Sherif.

Sherif had specified this deadline, annotating Kelman’s instructions with his pencilled scrawl. It was a pattern I recognised from his letters to Marvin Sussman: the adding of more detail to already exhaustive instructions. He dictated what time participant observers Carper and White must finish observing the boys each day, how and when and to whom they were to turn in their notes (Sherif), who would read their notes (Sherif and Kelman), and who they could and couldn’t discuss their observations with. Pooling their men’s typed observations with their own, the research team of Sherif, with Kelman, Sussman, and Harvey would formulate and finalise plans for the next day, rarely getting to bed before 2.00 am.

It felt like more than just a case of scientific scrupulousness at work here — something akin instead to an exaggerated fear of failure. Even acknowledging Sherif’s anxieties about the need for the experiment to go well, his close supervision and desire to detail everything meticulously gave the impression of a man who didn’t seem to trust the men working for him to get things right.

On the other hand, Sherif had an intellectual energy that swept others along. I can picture him striding up and down in front of his assembled team in the small room that served as an office, gesturing emphatically, his face glowing with heat and excitement, urging the men to remember the momentousness of this research, just as he had persuaded superiors at his university of the magnitude of his work. His staff were all young men at the beginning of their psychology careers, inspired and perhaps even a little overawed to be invited to work with a theoretician of his stature. If Sherif went on too long, if he repeated himself or sounded at times as if he was haranguing them, it was because they had not yet proved themselves. But did the men catch one another’s eye if he went on like this, I wondered, or did they look away?

As Sherif read the men’s typed notes, he marked points that needed following up with two dark pencil strokes in the margin, like exclamation marks without the points. In his notes on the second day, Carper naively included conjecture that went beyond observations of what he saw and heard among the boys. He noted the boys’ ‘apathy for organised sports’, suggesting it might be due to poor selection procedures — a remark that likely would have annoyed Sussman, given how much effort it had taken him. Carper’s comment would have bothered Sherif too: not just because it suggested scientific sloppiness but also because so much of the later conflict Sherif was planning revolved around competitive games. Perhaps Carper offered this observation to impress Sherif, not considering that it might light a fuse of antagonism.

Jack White’s notes, on the other hand, could be describing a completely different day. There is no mention of the boys’ reluctance or resistance towards group games. He stated which boys took charge and which boys were happy to take turns in archery, Horseshoes, and badminton. In White’s notes, boys volunteered to carry sporting equipment and to be captains for each team. White observed which boys were the best players. In contrast to Carper’s, White’s notes indicated that things were proceeding according to plan. I wondered about this discrepancy and remembered the photo of Sherif, smiling and relaxed, flanked by Jack White and OJ Harvey, and how, unlike in the other photos, where Sherif stood apart from the others, in this one he looked connected to these two men, as if an invisible string ran around and between them, binding them together. Of all the men, these two knew Sherif best, and with both using the experiment as the basis for their PhDs, they had as much invested in the experiment as Sherif himself.

I pored over these two versions of the same afternoon. In the discrepancies between these accounts lay the problem of this kind of research — despite Sherif’s best efforts to standardise the process, subjectivity could never be eliminated. But it seemed more than just a difference in point of view: the contrast between what Carper and White observed was stark. Jack White was thoroughly familiar with the details of Sherif’s work; his own dissertation was based on Sherif’s theory. From White’s vantage point, things were running smoothly, whereas Carper’s told another story. It seemed that already the men’s observations were being shaped by their point of view. But whose version would Sherif believe? Perhaps it was as early as this, the second day of the experiment, that the rift among the experimental team began.

At the end of the second night, after he’d reviewed Carper’s and White’s notes with the others, Sherif took Sussman and crossed the campsite in the darkness to the small tent Sherif had reserved for his own use, tucked away at the edge of the woods. As they would every night from this point, they stayed up into the small hours, Sussman typing up the next day’s events and Sherif refining and Sussman retyping. I can picture Sussman sitting and Sherif pacing in the tent, lit only by torch beam, discussing how they could make the boys interact. From the outside, the tent would have been an illuminated triangle, and even if one of the boys had seen it from the mess hall, they would likely not have realised anything was amiss.

Eventually the events were set. In my imagination, Sussman lit his pipe and began typing the script for the next morning’s announcement as Sherif paced back and forth, smoking. It was a script that, for the boys, would change everything.

The next morning, Saturday 26 July, the boys gathered after breakfast, as they’d been told, outside the recreation hall. Their luggage — a pile of suitcases and duffel bags, blankets and pillows — were piled up on the grass. Harry Ness made a carefully scripted announcement, but even Sussman’s final typed version Sherif had annotated with pencil, adding stage directions in parentheses:

The boys can now move into their permanent quarters, which consist of two tents. In announcing this mention that … the new arrangement will be much superior: sleeping facilities won’t be as congested, and also the rec hall will now be available for recreational facilities.

Ness then announces: “The following boys will be together in one tent. As I read your names, come up and stand here (point to one side).” He reads the names of one “group”. He then says: “The following boys will be in the other tent. As I read your names, come up and stand here (point to other side).”

(Note) While the names are being read and the boys are lining up, movies and pictures should be taken. Observers should note the reactions of the boys.

I don’t know what excuse, if any, the men used with the boys for taking photos this morning, although they are shot from a distance, as if the photographers might have been hiding themselves from view. There are a handful of pictures, as well as some film footage of this event. One photo is taken from the rec hall, looking down the slope to where Ness — tall as a bean pole, his pale legs glowing, wearing a white baseball cap — is speaking to the campers, who surround him in a half-circle.

The next photo is taken just a moment later, but from the front, facing Ness, after he has finished his announcement. The orderly half-circle is disrupted: some boys have stepped towards Ness, others have turned away. Most look dejected. Pairs that staff had noticed having fun together — including John and Doug, Peter and Laurence, Walt and Irving — have been separated and put in different groups.

Peter argued with Ness, telling him they should be allowed to stay with their friends and that he didn’t want to be separated from Laurence. Laurence, usually quick with a joke, looked ready to cry. When Ness insisted, Peter looked disgusted and turned away. Three more boys asked Ness if they could swap groups, and Jack White noticed another two boys crying as they went to get their luggage. The boys were upset that Ness, who had been so permissive since they arrived, allowing them to pursue their interests and their friendships freely, was now breaking them up in an arbitrary way and ignoring their pleas to be in a tent with their friends. Ness, the one the boys were told made all the decisions about what happened at camp, was in fact the fall guy, the one Sherif hoped the boys would blame instead of the other staff for ‘changes in policy … that might seem strange to the children’.

Sherif was jubilant at the boys’ misery because his first hypothesis had been proven. Note the displeasure of Ss (meaning subjects), he later wrote on the back of one of the photos. The boys’ sadness at being separated was a measure of their friendships. The stage was set for the next phase — what happens when friends are divided and end up on opposite sides in competing groups.