6

Showdown

Harry Ness tugged the pencil out from behind his ear as he waited for the Panthers to finish clearing away their breakfast dishes. The script had been typed the night before, but that morning Sherif had revised it again, so Ness had had no time to practise it.

In the kitchen, someone ran cold water into the frypan of bacon fat and hissing steam rose in a cloud. The boys jostled and jiggled at the table. Doug Griset had been coaxed out of the infirmary for breakfast, and the others were glad to see him.

Jack White called, ‘Listen here, Mr Ness has something to say, y’all.’

Ness cleared his throat and read from the clipboard, announcing that the other group of boys had challenged them to a three-day competition. The Panthers exclaimed excitedly, and he paused and waited for the chatter to die down. ‘This includes ballgames and feats of skill, such as tent pitching and tug of war.’ He turned to the shelf behind him. ‘The members of the team with the most points will win’ — here he tugged at a cloth that was covering something standing on the mantelpiece and glanced again at the clipboard — ‘these beautiful and expensive stainless-steel knives.’ Twelve knives fanned out in a half-circle on a stiff cardboard display stand. Ness shifted the stand so the silver caught the light and twinkled.

It was as though the air had been sucked out of the room. There was complete silence until someone breathed ‘Whoa!’, and then everyone was talking.

Ness raised his voice above the noise. ‘All the members of the group who win this tournament will enjoy the pleasure of owning such a fine camp knife. Remember, no one can win a knife by himself. So pull and work together. The only way you can win a knife is for your group to win — you have to get the most points by the time the tournament is over. So, go to it, fellows, work together as a team!’

Doug held his breath, gazing at the knives.

‘Only the winning team would get a prize,’ he told me. ‘There was no consolation prize. They paraded those knives at mealtimes. And this was not some little thing, this was a bowie knife that they were giving ten, eleven-year-old kids. Probably illegal to carry. And I wanted that jackknife so badly — every kid wanted it. Boy, believe me, did we want that knife. They were real good at getting us to want that prize. I’ve never been someone who’s had a use for knives. I’m not a hunter or into weapons. It surprises me how much I wanted that knife.’

Sherif had used expensive knives as a reward in his 1949 experiment and knew they were a good choice. He wrote that the boys in his first experiment ‘prayed for’ and ‘dreamed’ about those knives.

Doug remembers how often his team checked the barometer propped on the mantelpiece that showed each group’s scores. ‘There were a great many competitions that they put us through — and I put it that way because it reminded me of my years in basic training: “putting us through” rather than enjoying. They were testing us all the time as to whether we could be better than the others.’

Ness made exactly the same announcement to Jim Carper’s group, but they responded with mixed feelings. His inadvertently stilted delivery convinced the boys that he was still angry with them and didn’t want them to win. And their winning was even less likely given that Harold had gone home and they were one team member down. But they were excited to be seeing their friends again, and hurried off to the first game. When they arrived at the baseball field, they were surprised to see the other group kitted out in matching t-shirts and caps, with their Panther flag hanging from the backstop. Laurence made a joke of it, pointing at White, who also wore a Panther t-shirt, and saying, ‘You got a new recruit, fellas?’ But some, like Mickey, hung back. He told the others later that the men had outfitted the other boys because they were their favourite team.

Marv Sussman, umpiring, was eager for the game to start and clapped his hands to get the attention of the new arrivals. Who was the captain, he wanted to know, and what was their team name? The boys glanced round at one another. I imagined Sherif on the sidelines, perhaps holding a rake as a prop, watching closely. After a moment, Laurence volunteered for captain and then looked round at the others and said ‘Eagles?’ tentatively. It was not a group decision, Carper wrote.

Meanwhile, White had named Doug as catcher for the Panthers — a role best occupied by the team leader. Doug remembered being mystified by the staff’s choice. ‘I never was the catcher. I always batted first because I was small and fast and I could be the first person to get on base. But for some unimaginable reason they made me catcher. I had to be the smallest kid there. Catchers are big burly kids, like a block of granite, who are going to catch all the balls and block the plate.’

But Doug was a good choice in terms of team morale. Despite the Panthers’ outward signs of solidarity, before the game started Nathan and Joe threatened to depants Irving if he struck out during the game. Irving pushed his glasses nervously up his nose. Doug went over to Irving. ‘Don’t pay any attention to them, they just have to have someone to take it out on. They all like you, just as I do,’ White observed Doug saying in his notes. But Irving didn’t look reassured, and kept glancing worriedly at Nathan. Doug guaranteed Irving that he had the ‘best batting position on the team and they were counting on him’.

Soon the game was underway, and the sounds of the crack of the ball against the bat, the whistles and catcalls of the boys, and their ragged cheers drifted from the pitch towards the shadows of the trees, where Sherif stood well back, out of the full glare of the sun. The game went well for the Panthers, who got five runs in the first inning. When it was Irving’s turn to bat, he ‘hit a single and was cheered and embraced by his teammates’, White wrote. But then things took a dramatic turn.

Doug remembered, ‘They had me be catcher and I’ve got no protection except for a glove. I’m a little twink of a kid and I’m in the firing line for every kid coming round third base trying to score. So here I am, and I go over to block the plate when this kid came for third base, and he ran right through me.’ Whoomp, and Doug was knocked out cold. The kid who knocked him down was a quiet boy called Tony Gianelli, who was described as a ‘low status’ boy, a term they used for shy or reserved individuals who ranked down the group’s hierarchy in terms of leadership potential. But Laurence and John and the rest of Carper’s group knew that Tony would never hurt someone deliberately. Okay, he didn’t say much and he wasn’t sporty, and sometimes he wet the bed, but there was no way he would have done something like that on purpose. Tony wasn’t a physically adventurous kid. He’d only come on this camp because his older brother, his hero, had convinced him, telling him how much fun he had on scout camps and jambourees.

Doug’s teammates, the Panthers, raced across the field and gathered in a circle around Tony, accusing him of doing it on purpose. Tony had a shiny black pudding-bowl haircut that ended just above his prominent ears. His hands were balled into fists and his ears had turned red. He had a slow fuse, but it was lit now. OJ Harvey and Herb Kelman hurried over and lifted Doug between them, carrying him off the field. I imagined Sherif smoking furiously in the shade of the trees, exhilarated at this turn of events, to see his plans coming together.

Sussman blew his whistle and called the teams back to the game. But the Panthers were outraged that Sussman didn’t censure Tony for knocking Doug over. Nathan sneered at Sussman, ‘What, are they paying you to root for them?’ When play resumed, the Panthers vowed to ‘win the game for Doug’ and took up their positions again. I guessed that Sussman did this deliberately. What better way to have the Panthers unite as a single group and forget all ideas of going home? Harvey noted their ‘sarcasm and aggressive behavior’: they were ‘hollering, spitting, calling names’, yelling ‘cream puff, rubber ass, sons of bitches’. At first Harvey thought it was directed to the other team, but he was shocked to realise most of the Panthers’ hostility was directed at staff, who they felt had let Tony off the hook. Nathan called the other team’s junior counsellor, Rupe, ‘an overgrown turd bender’, a term that Harvey — who had been initiated into the Panthers’ swearing club and knew their rules — noted was the Panthers’ ‘most vulgar term’. What was the reluctant swearer Brian feeling now, I wondered.

As captain of the opposing team, Laurence called encouragement to the other boys, but his heart wasn’t in it. They were still upset for Tony, who glowered at the Panthers, and they were worried about Doug, and intimidated by the aggression and cursing of the Panther team. They played desultorily in the grinding heat until Harry Ness closed the game down and declared the Panthers the winners.

On the morning of the second day of the tournament, Carper’s boys lost both the tug of war and tent pitching, and on the way back to the mess hall for lunch, they concluded that the Panthers were a better team and deserved their win, the animosity of yesterday forgotten. But the last thing Sherif wanted was for Carper’s group to concede the tournament to the Panthers. If they ‘accept defeat’, he wrote, there was no chance of conflict. To lift their spirits, he sent Sussman to town to buy the boys a set of t-shirts as a surprise, and watched in the mess hall after lunch when Carper made a show of the mystery parcel, encouraging the boys to guess what was inside. They crowded round while he untied the string and exclaimed excitedly as he held up a t-shirt. With Carper’s encouragement, they chose a name for themselves. Some voted for Cobras, but finally they decided on the Pythons. Walt Burkhard didn’t know what a python was, but once Laurence explained it was like a boa constrictor, he embraced the name excitedly along with the others.

Doug scoffed when I reminded him about the names for each team and wondered who had suggested them in the first place. ‘Why would you call kids Panthers and Pythons, two killing animals? And then have them fighting over jackknifes, which you could use to kill somebody? Why didn’t they call the teams Panda Bears and Dolphins or something? See, it’s the premise — they weren’t researching it, they were trying to prove they were right!’ Doug was by then on his own investigative trail. He had contacted the archivist in charge of the Sherif papers to ask for material that described him at the time. Doug was interrogating the story of the experiment, sifting through his memories to confirm how difficult it would have been to persuade American boys like him to fight one another.

The Pythons seemed buoyed by the men’s attention. Carper was taking the lead with them, and they responded eagerly. Later that day, he wrote in his notes that he was gone for half an hour, and when he returned, all the Pythons had climbed on the roof of his cabin:

I was fooling around with them a bit when they all decided to take me on. There was about a 15 minute tussle with everyone rolling round in the dust. At the end I was completely fatigued … At one point they were all in the counselors cabin and when they were finally put out with alot [sic] of difficulty they still hung around …’

It was a striking passage — not just because of the affection and playfulness it revealed between Carper and his group but also because it was so different from the dry style that placed the men as passive observers of the action. Now, with Sherif’s approval, the men had to show they were keeping the boys happy and preventing the homesickness that had threatened the experiment. But didn’t Sherif realise that allowing the men to be cheerleaders and motivators of the boys prevented the development of group dynamics that he had intended?

At night, Sherif and Sussman pored over the observers’ notes. The agonising wait for something concrete to happen in line with his predictions was taking a toll on Sherif. He rarely went to bed before 2.00 am, and he was so wound up that he had trouble sleeping. Flouting staff policy, he began to drink whisky after the boys were asleep. But that just made things worse. From their experience with Sherif at the University of Oklahoma, Harvey and White already knew that when he was drinking, unless Carolyn was around to keep it in check, he became paranoid and mistrustful and blamed those around him when things weren’t going to plan.

Sussman did what he could to dispel Sherif’s suspicions. Luckily, he had a thick skin. It had been developed during the war when, as a conscientious objector, he was assigned to work as a hospital orderly, and he had endured abuse from staff and patients at a time when many regarded people like him as traitors, spies, and worse. He tried to calm Sherif, taking dictation and endless notes on what to say the next day to keep staff in order.

At first, Sussman might have taken pleasure in this role: the satisfaction of feeling needed and important when he had begun to feel some days like a real-life administrator of the camp rather than the research associate that Sherif had promised he’d be. He stayed up with Sherif most nights, doing what he could to reassure Sherif that the next day would go without a hitch. But soon the lack of sleep began getting to him too.

Carolyn wrote doggedly every two or three days, telling Sherif news of herself and the children and summarising any mail that had arrived. On his birthday she sent him a new sweater as a gift. But he didn’t answer her letters. Finally, she wrote in a burst of exasperation — and probably sensing something was wrong — ‘For goodness sake, let us hear from you!’ But the world outside the campsite had disappeared for Sherif. The isolated camp in the woods had become his ‘whole universe’. I imagine it was in the middle of one of these sleepless nights, after a few glasses of whisky, that he finally replied to her letters. In an undated and rambling note, he wrote that life at the camp was ‘hectic’ and demanding. ‘There is so much to do, so many significant and insignificant item to attend [sic]. I have to think and think hard to put all of them together — that means a constant state of alertness, tension and perspective. It is hard on everybody and especially on me.’ Here he drew an arrow to the margin of the page and added: ‘I suppose I should not have expected any lighter load than this. It is not fair to expect persons who are working so hard here to coordinate smoothly their pieces in this whale of a project to which I grew up during the last twenty years with so much pain and sweat.’

During the day he prowled the camp, making last-minute changes and increasingly inserting himself in group activities so he could observe the boys with his own eyes instead of relying on the observations of the men.

In this third stage of the experiment, Sherif was aiming for outright conflict. When the Panthers found a large fly in their tent, their counsellor suggested they name it after the other team and burn it. OJ Harvey ‘took photos of the cremation’, and, to make sure he got good-enough photos, White wrote, another fly was caught and ‘the burning was repeated’. But over lunch the same day — the first time the boys had eaten together since their separation more than a week ago — the observers noted the boys stopped at one another’s tables for ‘friendly chat’.

And Carper’s Pythons, instead of being fired up about their losses, were demotivated. Rather than the hoped-for talk of anger and revenge against their opposing team, the Pythons felt outclassed. Without enmity and competition, the experiment couldn’t progress to the next stage. Sherif had used what he called ‘frustration exercises’ successfully in his earlier study: incidents where the men secretly vandalised the property of one group so they would blame their opponents and retaliate. It had been the flint that sparked physical fights between the groups in his earlier study, and he decided to use it again now.

In the mess hall, hearing the dejection of the Pythons, Sherif decided it was time to up the ante. He waited until Carper and his boys left, and White brought his victorious Panthers in for their dinner. Perhaps he instructed Sussman to do it, perhaps he did it himself, but while the boys were eating, someone took a knife to the Panthers’ tent on the other side of the clearing and cut the rope of their Panthers flag, pulled it to the ground, and stamped on it with muddy boots.

The boys were dismayed when they got back to the tent and found their flag trampled. Peter saw Mr Musee and Harry Ness passing nearby and called out, asking if they’d seen what happened. The two men came over. Sherif answered that he hadn’t seen anyone cut the rope, but that the other group had been in the vicinity earlier. The boys showed Harry Ness the vandalised flag. Then Sherif intervened and ‘asked Mr Ness if it might be possible to have the two sides discuss their complaints together’. It’s a sign of Sherif’s impatience that he interjected. Did any of the boys wonder why the camp caretaker — whose job was to chop wood, run errands, and keep the grounds and buildings clean — weighed in like this?

Reading the men’s observation notes against Sherif’s notebook and the published version of the experiments, at times it was as if Sherif chose only what he wanted to see in the observation notes. He had read the men’s descriptions of the ballgame, with the boys’ spitting, name calling, and physical bullying, and interpreted it as the boys in one team discriminating against and belittling the other. In Sherif’s eyes, this was evidence a major hypothesis had been proven: ‘[g]roup members will prefer friends from within their (new) group … Subjects whose initial personal preferences are in the other group … will develop negative attitudes verging on enmity towards the outgroup …’ But he seemed to ignore the evidence that all the men watching had noted in one way or another — the anger and disappointment of both teams directed at the adults involved in the games. Harvey wrote how the Panthers accused him of ‘interference’ in the play, and argued with the umpire over his decision. When Sussman called a Panther runner safe when he clearly wasn’t, the Pythons yelled, ‘Kill the umpire!’ Carper’s Pythons discussed with him at dinner that they felt the Panthers’ counsellors were coaching them to victory. The adults’ attempts to fan enmity by skewing the scores, first for one group, then for the other, backfired. Despite the division of the two groups and the competition, the boys shared a common view that the adults were playing favourites.

This was not the way the boys expected the men to behave — particularly not when it came to adjudicating at a baseball game. Baseball was a hugely popular sport and many of the boys would have been members of the Little League, which, in the wake of World War II, was being used as a vehicle for promoting the values of American democracy. Boys were taught that in Little League, rules were applied in a spirit of fairness, and if there was a dispute, adult umpires made even-handed and just judgements based on what they observed. ‘This type of loyalty is the same thing we call good citizenship as applied to the city, that we call patriotism as applied to the country,’ noted William J. Baker in Playing with God: religion and modern sport. Above all, boys were expected to learn how to win and lose graciously. In Little League, boys learned the value of ‘good-natured’ competition, where there was no lashing out, and no one left with hard feelings.

Sherif, it seemed, had made a major tactical error in conceiving of sport, and baseball in particular, as a metaphor for war, and that in losing a baseball game one team would turn on the other for revenge. Herb Kelman and Jim Carper wrote later that this was a major problem with the experiment: ‘Here a cultural pattern of sportsmanship came into play. There is rivalry while the tournament lasts but little transfer to other aspects of the relationship.’ The boys had had ‘specific training in discrimination between situations of competition in sports (where aggression is socially approved) and other interpersonal or intergroup relations …’

Brian agreed that in baseball the concept of fair play was paramount. ‘Once the game was over, you had to line up and shake the hand of every other person on the opposite team, no matter how bad you might have felt if you’d lost.’ It was an inclusive and forgiving sport. ‘I was never really good at baseball,’ Brian told me, ‘but I was never made to feel bad about it. People encouraged you for trying.’

Doug was insistent that the experimental team had made a major blunder. ‘They missed the point. The point was to try to have us lose sight of what we’d been taught since we were little boys, and that was sportsmanship. You might want to fight tooth and nail over your ability to win a ballgame over another group, but you would not fight physically with them afterwards because that would have made you a lesser person. Your victory would have been snatched right away from you, you would have been considered a loser, not a winner. So I think whoever put two groups of kids and had them fighting over sports didn’t understand American kids,’ Doug told me emphatically. ‘I know that sounds pretty romantic, a romanticised version of what took place, but the facts bore it out, didn’t they?’

Later that same afternoon Harry Ness agreed to call a meeting for the boys to ‘discuss their complaints’ in the mess hall. Carper hid in the rafters to watch, and turned on the tape recorder they had secretly installed there.

At first, it was pandemonium. Listening to the tape, I had to take the headphones off as the voices roared in my ears. The boys were lined up on each side of the long table, shouting accusations. The Panthers accused the Pythons of cutting the flagpole rope because they were sore losers. The Pythons, insulted, yelled back in shrill and angry voices. ‘We did not! You did it!’

‘Why would we cut our own flag down?’ one Panther yelled. I pictured Nathan, always quick to anger. ‘We paid for it with our own money!’

‘No one in our group has a knife!’ a Python retorted, and their individual voices were lost in the roar of protests.

Peter, the oldest Panther, sat down abruptly at the table and tapped on it until the yelling died down. But the boys on both sides shifted and muttered. Peter looked around at the boys in his group and then waved his hand at the Pythons, who were lined up on the other side of the table. ‘If any of these guys had cut it, they would have told us. They can’t keep it to themselves.’ He grinned at Laurence.

There was some laughter from both sides of the room.

‘We’re not such sore losers that we’d go and do something like cut the rope.’ Laurence pulled out a chair and sat down too. Around him, the other boys muttered their agreement.

‘Who said we did it?’ Laurence wanted to know. ‘Where did you get the idea we had a grudge?’ He looked at Peter and the rest of the Panthers.

The Panthers looked around at one another but no one seemed to remember exactly where the idea had come from. If anyone remembered that Mr Mussee, the caretaker, had implied it was the Pythons, they didn’t say.

Peter stood up abruptly and called his group into a huddle and they whispered intently, arms around one another’s shoulders. The Pythons looked on, pretending they weren’t trying to listen. The huddle broke up and Peter announced, ‘Okay, if you all swear on the Bible, we’ll believe you didn’t cut the flagpole rope.’

One by one the Pythons stood and put their hand on the Bible, which rested on a folded American flag. Laurence went first, wriggling to get comfortable and clearing his throat as if he was about to make a speech, causing the boys to laugh. Then he said solemnly, ‘I swear by the Bible and the flag that I did not cut the flagpole rope.’ A wobbly cheer went up. John went next, drawing more applause. As each Python boy made his pledge, the others clapped and whistled. When it was Tony’s turn, he added ‘the Father, Son and Holy Ghost’ to his pledge, and there was approving applause. Ill will between the two groups evaporated: Carper observed from his hiding place in the rafters that ‘this reduced most of the violent hostility’. Any conflict had fizzled.

Carper’s description of the meeting in the mess hall would offer no comfort to Sherif. The boys had resolved their differences and disappointed the researchers’ expectations.

Sherif, desperate to ‘increase hostility’, told Ness to announce after supper that night that the staff ‘forgot’ to add some events to the tournament. They had craft activities and songs and skits already scheduled, but added more competitive activities. Ness told the groups that Capture the Flag was added, as well as a second tug of war and a treasure hunt. Then Sherif hurried away with Herb Kelman.

The Panthers were immediately suspicious when the additions to the tournament were announced. They guessed that Ness was favouring the Pythons, giving them a chance to get ahead. They were right.

The day before, after his baseball injury Doug had ended up in the infirmary a second time in as many days — which explained to me why he thought he had been in hospital. Once again, his homesickness had flared, and Sussman had convinced Sherif they were better off letting the boy go home, in case his homesickness became ‘contagious’. Doug’s parents were arriving that night to take him home. While Ness was making his announcement about additions to the tournament, Harvey was walking the ‘downcast’ Doug along the track towards the road. Harvey wrote that the two caretakers, Mr Mussee and Mr Herbie — Sherif and Kelman — caught up with them and offered to carry Doug’s things. Doug seems to have been having second thoughts, especially given the Panthers’ victory that day and the chance to be with his friends from the other group again. But it was too late; his father had likely already arrived and was waiting, engine running, at the turn-off to the camp.

Sherif, intent on gathering ‘data’ from the boy before he left, asked Doug why he thought the Panthers were winning everything, clearly hoping for an answer that showed ‘glorification’ of his group. But Doug shrugged. ‘Luck, I guess … I guess we have more confidence.’ Harvey picked up the questioning. What did Doug think of his Panther group? ‘They’re all good guys, every one of them, even in the other group, I love them all,’ Doug answered.

Night was falling, and I imagined they walked the rest of the way in silence, the air fizzing with insects, Doug regretful about not getting a knife, and Sherif thinking it was best that the boy went home after all. When they saw the glow of headlights, they would have stopped, and Sherif and Kelman would have handed over Doug’s bags.

Doug doesn’t remember that evening, but he looked up Muzafer Sherif online and even though ‘it seems impossible … but darned if I don’t think I recall that face. He looked serious, dark, a little scary.’ I imagined this memory was from Doug’s last glimpse of Sherif, turning away with a scowl in the half dark and melting into the shadows, leaving Harvey to see Doug off.

The next day, Monday 2 August, the third day of the tournament was rigged in favour of the Pythons to ‘increase morale’. Sussman and Sherif decided that keeping the scores of the two teams level would increase aggression and competitiveness between them. The Panthers were given a longer route in treasure hunt, the clues were harder to find, and staff deliberately slowed them down. Camp inspection was scheduled at the same time as the Panthers’ kitchen duty, so they had less time to clean up their tent. By the time the ballgame was announced, the Panthers, who were already commenting on the favouritism Ness was showing to the Pythons, refused to play if Ness was umpire, accusing him of ‘cheating them’ and calling him ‘a dirty bastard’ among themselves.

Sherif engineered another frustration episode before dinner, taking items of the Panther clothing and hiding them in the Pythons’ tent, then smearing the Panthers’ table with the Pythons’ leftover food. But the Panthers didn’t take the bait. They attributed the missing clothes to a mix-up with the laundry, and while they were irritated about the mess on their table, and threatened to do the same to the Pythons, they never followed through on it.

On the barometer in the mess hall, the Pythons, until now the losing team, began to pull ahead. But the adults’ tactics had become increasingly clear, particularly to the Panthers, who now expected that they would be discriminated against. I imagined that the Panthers would have been feeling angry, but also vulnerable, given they were far from home with adults who seemed biased against them. They were only ten and eleven, too young to have developed the teenage bravado that could hide feelings of fear or anxiety. Sherif seemed not to have noticed that he was testing a completely different group dynamic — the effect of discrimination by a group with more power and authority on the self-esteem and performance of a less powerful group.

The boys’ unhappiness showed itself in their treatment of one another too. Kelman wrote that instead of directing their anger to their opponents, the Panthers had turned on one another as well as blaming the adults. This competition phase was supposed to bring each team together, but after each game there was recriminations and bickering.

There was bullying happening in Carper’s Pythons group too. ‘I had a fight with one of the boys, another Python,’ Walt Burkhard told me. ‘I don’t remember what it was about, but I remember getting hold of a t-shirt of his and cutting it up with a pocket knife. I don’t know what it was I was so angry about, but it was so out of character for me, especially pulling out a pocket knife to do some damage. I’ve never done anything like this again.’

It was hard to imagine Walt, this rather shy, softly spoken man, ‘raising hell’. He had a youthful face, hatched round the eyes with fine lines, and bristly grey hair. Even though I got to the San Diego café before him, he was not the type to approach someone he’d never met. Instead, when he arrived he took a table outside and waited for me to come and find him. ‘You can ask me any questions you want,’ he said. But he paused over each snippet of memory or vague recollection as if weighing it for accuracy.

Walt looked troubled, recalling the self of this 1953 summer camp. As a professor of computer science, he was used to problems with clear solutions, but the behaviour of his eleven-year-old self in the summer of 1953 was a puzzle he was still trying to solve.

By the fourth day of the tournament, as the antagonism between the two groups failed to materialise, tension was building among the staff. On one side of the divide was Carper and Kelman; on the other was Sherif, Sussman, Harvey and White.

The archery contest that day was a turning point where the differences between the two groups of men became clear, with Kelman and Carper maintaining their role as observers, and the others acting more like participants. The clearing where the archery range was set up was small, a patch of short grass encircled by broad, leafy trees. It was cooler, with the wind stirring the trees, striping the edges of the grass with bands of shadow and light. Carper observed that there was a lot of ‘fraternising’ going on between boys on opposite teams: they helped one another retrieve arrows and yelled encouragement to their opponents. Kelman wrote that ‘there was very little name-calling or serious hostility on the part of either group’. Perhaps because the archery conjured happy memories of the first couple of days, the boundaries between the two teams vanished. Boys on both sides cried out in admiration when an arrow landed with a ‘puck’ in the target, no matter which team the archer was on.

Jack White decided to take action. He tried to round up his Panther group, summoning Peter, who was coaching Laurence on how to better hold his bow, and telling Irving, who had joined Walt and Eric in the Python line, not to talk to the other team. But Carper and Kelman made no effort to stop the two teams from mixing. There might have been little hostility between the two groups of boys, but between the staff tensions were brewing.

During the fifth day of the tournament, amid a game of football, it got too much for Marvin Sussman, who likely saw the whole summer of hard work about to be wasted and his book chapter with Sherif slipping away. When he arrived partway through the game, Sussman was infuriated to see Carper allowing boys from both groups to crowd around ‘in a concerned manner’ when a boy was hurt during play.

In Sussman’s eyes, Carper was clearly encouraging a friendly atmosphere and wasn’t doing enough to promote rivalry and retaliation among the boys. Carper described the many ‘gestures of friendship’ between the two teams, but Sussman believed he should have been doing more to stop it. Sussman’s notes for Sherif bristled with impatience and irritation: ‘The game was being slowed down by the poor refereeing and the lack of enthusiasm of some of the counsellors in charge of the boys.’

Sussman took over, replacing Carper as referee and speeding up the game so the boys had to play faster and harder. He also overlooked rules in favour of the Pythons to keep the overall tournament scores neck and neck. Sussman wrote a particular note at the end of his description of the game, pointing out that if he, Sussman, had been in charge of the game from the start, it would have ‘resulted in the hostility desired for this stage … and the conflict situation which was called for’. He went on, ‘In terms of the experimental design this game should have been speeded up, the boys encouraged to “fight” their hardest, much as a good coach does with his football team, and the football rules should have been overlooked when necessary so as to satisfy the conditions set for this activity and stage.’ In short, Sussman was saying to Sherif, let me take over. With me in charge, the experiment will be a success.

That night, Sherif gave his approval and told Sussman to replace Carper. Sherif’s reason for getting rid of Carper was not because he wasn’t intervening actively enough: he and Sussman, unable to countenance the idea that some boys might have seen through the ruse, accused Carper of spreading the ‘rumor’ that the camp was an experiment. ‘The expose of the experiment became a “joke” with some of the members of staff,’ Sussman wrote sourly. Years later, Sherif told a graduate student that the study failed because a ‘fellow from Yale told the kids that they were being studied’. But Carper’s notes were littered with examples of the boys’ own suspicions about the camp, from the first day when Harold asked what the microphones in the rafters were for, to the accusations that they had been separated to see how they would respond, to the unfair penalties imposed by the adults in games. Sherif could not believe that the boys would have noticed anything without one of the adults giving the game away. On the other hand, Carper noticed how alert, curious, and observant the boys were to the adults and their surroundings. The day before, Carper had written that when Harvey approached some of the Python boys with the idea of a boxing match, one boy ‘introduced the subject of trickery’ and others chipped in with their suspicions, saying, ‘You want to make us fight the others.’

Maybe it was the heat in the small, stuffy office where he and Sussman met that day after the game. Maybe it was that Carper felt sorry for Sussman and the impossible job he had taken on — he was likely looking exhausted after almost three weeks of sitting up until the small hours of the morning, night after night, with Sherif drinking and pacing and agonising, and going over and over every small detail. But Carper didn’t protest when Sussman told him he was being replaced. Perhaps Carper was relieved to give up what by now he saw as a charade. He had little tolerance for duplicity. He had rebelled against the hypocrisy of his father, a pious and peace-loving member of the Mennonite community in public who, behind closed doors, beat his son often. Whenever he went home, he enjoyed showing off his secular lifestyle — smoking, offering his nephews and nieces sips of liquor from a flask. But Carper bit back his scepticism about the experiment that he would in fact describe in later years to colleagues as a ‘joke’, and agreed to take on whatever other duties were needed before the experiment ended.

As for Herb Kelman, he had been taking his role as ‘scientific conscience’ too seriously for Sherif’s liking, especially when Kelman objected to the men’s behaviour at the nightly staff meeting after the archery contest. ‘I pointed out that they were going beyond observation of behaviour. You’re supposed to observe, not to directly influence the way the boys respond because that’s manipulation. There were points at which OJ and Jack, who were students of Sherif’s and very close to him, would push things along … to encourage certain kinds of behaviours … People don’t necessarily do it consciously, I’ve great respect for these people, but they were students of Sherif’s and dependent on him. They were in a very delicate, tricky situation.’ Kelman didn’t say it, but Sherif’s watchful presence around the campsite as well as his own spontaneous interventions would have encouraged them too. But I was surprised when I read that Sherif, after this staff meeting, decided to exclude Kelman from all future meetings. Sherif had anticipated the potential for this kind of bias to happen at the start and had engaged Kelman to guard against it. Yet the very thing that Sherif had wanted to avoid he found impossible to resist.

As far as Kelman was concerned, he was just doing his job. ‘My role was to point out, “Come on, you’re not supposed to do that, it’s like getting into the maze with the rat and pushing it. And you’re not supposed to push the rat.”’

But it seemed this was the last thing Sherif wanted to hear.

On the sixth day of the tournament, the activities were comparatively low-key — making model planes and performing songs and skits. Harvey, replacing Carper as participant observer, and White actively took on the role of coaches, cheerleaders, and combatants in charge of their teams, with Sussman’s enthusiastic support.

It was the last day of the tournament. Sherif and Sussman had agreed the night before that the Panthers were at risk of giving up on the competition because they believed the men were favouring the other team, and as they had been susceptible to the ‘contagion’ of homesickness, they should be allowed to win. So they stacked the odds against the Pythons — the models the Pythons were given to assemble in the arts and craft contest were more intricate and difficult to finish by the deadline. In the mess hall, each team sat at a table on either side of the room, Harvey egging on the Pythons, ‘congratulating and encouraging’ them as they showed him their work, while White and Harvey traded ‘loud’ comments on the progress of each group.

At 2.00 pm, both groups gathered outside the rec hall for the announcement of the winners. When Ness read out the final score and announced the Panthers as winners, ‘there were wild shouts and some of them jumped up and down,’ Harvey wrote. As well as the ‘beautiful jackknives’, they were given a $10 cheque, which they ran and gave to Jack White for ‘coaching us and helping us win’. They asked Ness for Doug’s address so they could send him his knife and suggested to him that the Pythons should also receive a prize even though they hadn’t won.

The losing Pythons were subdued. They sat around on the ground, pulling on blades of grass and not looking at one another. But the Panthers didn’t gloat. Peter and Brian led their team over to shake the Pythons’ hands and ‘commended them for their good performance’, praising their skills.

Sherif, observing from the back door of the mess hall, would have watched this with a rising sense of panic and anger. It was all wrong. Here they were at the end of the third stage, when the competitions were supposed to have got the boys riled up about their opponents. To the Pythons, the victory of the Panthers should have felt like salt rubbed into their wounds. Anger was supposed to spill into violence, fighting, and retaliation. Sherif had promised this much, and more — a dramatic denouement where he was able to bring together fractious and warring groups into a harmonious whole. In the final stage, when the hostility and hatred between the boys had reached fever pitch, Sherif planned to set fire to the forest so the boys would be forced to cooperate to save their campsite and join forces to put out the flames.

In his efforts to get one group fighting the other, Sherif and his staff had cut the rope on a precious flag, ‘stolen’ items of laundry, and smeared and demolished the food set up for one group’s dinner, all to trigger a fight between them. Each time, the boys’ irritation and anger was transitory. The only enduring resentment among the losing Pythons was against the staff. Now the Pythons were complaining they had been treated unfairly. Instead of blaming the Panthers, they attributed their loss to the actions of the adults — in particular, the unfair rules imposed by Ness during the tug of war; the favouritism of Sussman, who gave them noticeably more difficult models to assemble in arts and crafts; and the treachery of Mr Mussee, who, being a caretaker, would naturally be short of money and open to bribes from Sussman to vote against them in songs and skits.

The irony was that the boys’ identification of when the adults were rigging the results was — apart from the bribery of the caretaker theory — spot on. They’d been treated unjustly and they knew it.

So what happened next should have come as no surprise.

OJ Harvey sat around the campfire on the hill after supper with the dejected Pythons. It was a warm night, but he built up the fire and sparks flew skywards, the light casting an orange glow over the boys’ glum faces. Harvey was trying to encourage someone to tell a ghost story, but the boys weren’t enthusiastic. A sudden burst of noise made them all jump. Irving, one of the Panthers, burst from the trees, yelling and sobbing. ‘You’d better get down there!’ His glasses flashed orange in the firelight. ‘Or we’ll wreck your tent!’

The boys around the fire jumped to their feet and began running down the hill, racing towards their campsite. Harvey hurried behind them. Down in the staff office, Kelman heard the shouting too and hurried outside to see what was going on. Kelman and Carper, now both outsiders, had no knowledge of the night’s plans.

Laurence, Walt, Tony, and the other Pythons raced to their tent. The Panthers were there waiting for them, shouting and jeering. The Python tent gaped open, the pale shapes of their bedding and clothes strewn about in the dirt. It was impossible at first to tell what was going on. Boys on both sides were shouting and crying out their dismay.

‘Are you crazy?’ Laurence cried.

‘Now you’ve done it!’ someone yelled.

‘What happened?’ Mickey stood with his mouth open.

I imagined the boys ranged on either side of the tent, their eyes glittering, the din of their raised voices, their pounding hearts. And Sherif in the shadows, holding his breath.

Amid the shouting, Laurence and the rest of the Pythons demanded to know why the Panthers had wrecked their tent. Anger distorted the features of the other boys, who faced them so defiantly. Over the noise, some of the boys pieced together the story. The Panthers had arrived back at camp after their celebratory marshmallow roast and found their own tent demolished and their belongings strewn about. They assumed the Pythons had done it, so they ran straight to the Pythons’ tent and retaliated. Laurence, whose lower lip was trembling, yelled over the top of their cursing and crying, ‘But we were up there! All of us.’ He pointed up the hill, to where the fire glowed among the trees.

The boys went quiet. Fear flickered from one boy’s face to another.

‘We were scared,’ Brian Wood told me. ‘If it wasn’t one of us, then who was it?’ They were no longer Pythons or Panthers; they were a group of children in the dark at the edge of the woods, where shadows seemed to be gathering. A shiver ran through the group and the boys instinctively stood closer together.

‘Come see,’ Peter said into the quiet, gesturing back towards the tent on the other side of the stream. ‘Come see!’

Then the boys were running again, but this time in a single throng, their shouts echoing through the woods as they poured across to the other side of the camp.

At the Panthers’ tent, it was pandemonium. The boys cried out in dismay, ‘See? See?’ The tent was flattened, suitcases had been thrown among the bushes, bedding was strewn around in the dirt. Irving picked up his broken ukulele and began to cry. The boys stood in a huddle, their faces pale. Peter turned to Laurence and the rest of the Pythons and said shrilly, ‘Do you see now why we’re mad at you?’ Laurence said that he could see it.

The boys spread out in twos and threes and began picking up clothing and shifting beds. Some moved around the base of the tent, preparing to lift the centre pole and get it standing again. One boy went to fetch a lantern. All of them moved around the tent gingerly. Who could have done this? they asked one another.

Harvey arrived and called out that the Pythons should return to their own area, but the boys didn’t reply. White was doing his best to keep the groups separate too: he announced that the Panthers could look after it themselves. Harvey persuaded the Pythons that they should get back and sort out their own tent, but they left reluctantly, promising the Panthers they’d be back as soon as they were done.

Kelman stayed behind at the Panther tent, helping to set it straight and eavesdropping as the boys discussed who could have done it. Peter and Irving shook the dirt out of the sleeping bags. They had decided the other group had nothing to do with it. Peter said, ‘Laurence said the Pythons didn’t do it and he doesn’t lie. Laurence is no liar.’ Irving agreed. White, who was smoothing out trampled pillows, said no one else could have done it, but the boys yelled back at him: ‘They couldn’t have done it, because if they had they wouldn’t have offered their help!’

Then Kelman went to the other side of the stream, to the Python tent, to help the boys tidy the mess. They were agitated. Eric, whose accordion was untouched, was upset for Irving and his broken ukulele, and said angrily that he would go around and demand an alibi from all the adults in the camp. As they retrieved things from the ground, they kept up a staccato discussion, considering and just as quickly discarding different theories. Perhaps it was Sandy the cook, someone said, who had told the boys he was angry that he hadn’t been able to go to the races at Saratoga Springs. Someone else suggested the caretakers. Eric said aggressively to Herb Kelman, ‘Where were you?’ Laurence turned to Harvey and asked whether this was an experimental camp. ‘Maybe you just wanted to see what our reactions would be.’ I imagine Carper would have busied himself moving the lantern, or straightening a suitcase, not trusting himself to answer. When the boys told Carper soon afterwards that they were going to help the other group put up their tent, he made no move to stop them. Meanwhile, Harvey went in search of Sherif to tell him he hadn’t been able to stop the two groups from helping each other, bumping into Kelman on the way. Kelman told Harvey that the Pythons should not be stopped if they wanted to help the Panthers straighten up their tent. Harvey included his curt reply in his notes of the evening: ‘I replied that if I stopped them, I would specify such in my report’, before he hurried on.

Harvey heard Sherif’s voice, high and rising, before he rounded the corner of the mess hall and saw the men silhouetted against the light from the windows. Sherif had clearly heard the news. Sussman was saying something in an urgent voice, but Harvey couldn’t catch it.

‘Dr Sherif,’ Harvey hissed, hoping Sherif would lower his voice. But Sherif was oblivious. Harvey’s mouth went dry when he saw Sherif’s face, red with fury. ‘A vulture,’ Sherif spat the words out.

Sussman’s face was pale and shiny with sweat, and he kept pushing his glasses up his nose.

‘A greedy vulture!’ In Sherif’s mind, Sussman had ruined the experiment out of his selfish lust for credit. Everything about Sussman, from his youth to his ambition, now infuriated Sherif. He took another step towards Sussman, shaking both his fists in the air around Sussman’s ears.

Sussman nervously licked his lips and took a step back. ‘But we agreed!’ Sussman protested. ‘Dr Sherif, we agreed before supper —’

‘I never said!’

‘Dr Sherif,’ Harvey said more loudly, skirting the fire ring and wood pile.

Sussman looked imploring at Harvey. ‘OJ, tell him.’

But Harvey pursed his lips and gave his head a little shake as if to say, it’s no use. Sherif had been drinking, and Harvey knew that trying to reason with him in this state was hopeless. He’d seen Sherif furious and on the attack before, but never like this. This night, Harvey told me, Sherif had gone ‘bonkers’.

Sherif drew back his fist, ready to take a swing, and Harvey picked up a piece of wood from the pile and grabbed Sherif’s arm. ‘Dr Sherif!’ he said, pulling on his arm to get his attention. ‘If you do it, I’m gonna hit you.’

Sherif tried to shake him off, but Harvey held firm.

‘We discussed it …’ Sussman was babbling. ‘We did …’

And they had, just an hour earlier. Harvey wrote in his notes:

Around 7.00 pm, before Sussman talked to Sherif, I met with Sussman by the mess hall and we discussed the frustration planned for the night. The consensus had been reached between Sherif, Sussman, myself, and Jack White that the frustration should be against the Panthers since they had won the tournament and seemed quicker to get angry and seek revenge against the other group.

While the boys were engaged at their marshmallow roast, Harvey wrote, ‘Sussman was to go to the Panthers’ tent and wreck it.’

The competition and now the wrecked tent had not only provoked no hostility, but the boys were reconciled, and had turned on the staff. I thought of Kelman’s remark about how Sherif was unable to accept that he might have been wrong. Even if the tent-pulling incident wasn’t his idea, he’d agreed to it, but now he looked desperately for a scapegoat. And Sussman was it.

Sherif abruptly stopped struggling against Harvey and then turned and rushed away. At 11.00 pm that night, he called all the men into the mess hall and announced the experiment was over. OJ Harvey, Jack White, and even Marvin Sussman argued that they should continue, since they’d come this far, but Sherif, despondent and looking exhausted, refused to listen.

I thought of the letters Sherif had written in the months leading up to the experiment, his mood of foreboding at the prospect of what he called a ‘Herculean’ task. I had thought, reading these letters, that this vision of himself as the lonely hero labouring against the odds and his at times extravagant and sentimental language had seemed overly melodramatic. From his letters and writings, Muzafer Sherif saw himself in dramatic terms, as a social scientist labouring to reveal a profound truth, someone whose work was his life. This study was the end product of three years of funding and countless years of work. The failure of this study was more than a setback; it would have felt catastrophic. Still, he first blamed Carper and Kelman, and then his right-hand man Marvin Sussman, for the study’s lack of success, unable to admit even in the face of all the evidence that the theory he put forward was the element at fault.

‘He was devastated,’ OJ Harvey told me. ‘He hardly spoke for the next two days. He took it very badly and was deeply depressed.’ Sherif stayed in the tent by the edge of the birch grove and made it clear he wanted to be alone.

Meanwhile, each of the men used the remaining days of the camp to deal with what had happened in their own way. Harvey and White grappled with what they would do now for their dissertation. Sussman did his best to keep himself busy and useful, trying to ignore the fact that Sherif was blaming him for the study’s failure. Kelman and Carper wrote detailed notes summarising how and why the study failed so that Sherif had an account to guide him in case there was a next time.

In the last days of the camp, the boys felt abandoned. Jim Carper and Jack White no longer showed any interest in them, and looked tense and unhappy. Even the caretaker, who had been everywhere they went during the first couple of weeks, was nowhere to be seen. Walt remembers roaming aimlessly around the camp with a bunch of other boys, and at one point stopping to throw bricks at the old upright piano near the mess hall. ‘Why we did this I don’t know, but we destroyed that piano.’ Walt, the son of a piano teacher, who had been learning the instrument for five years before this camp, sounded mournful. I imagined the sound of the bricks hitting the keys, the crash of discordant notes, the piano booming and shrieking, the lid caving in, the front board gaping, the hammers splintered into pieces. Walt is still unsettled by the memory of it: ‘It was so out of character for me.’ I imagined how loud the silence would have seemed when it was over, with the boys looking at the piano split and tumbled in the dirt as if they were waiting for something to happen, but it would have been quiet, just the tick of insects and the rustle of the leaves nudged by the hot wind. ‘There was a sense we had of being on our own. There was no one stepping in and saying, “Hey, you can’t do that.”’

And it was that moment that was most unsettling — that feeling that nothing they did mattered, no one would stop them, no adult was going to intervene and tell them what was or wasn’t against any rules. ‘When it was over I was not happy with myself. It was so out of character,’ Walt repeated.

But there was a sense of freedom too. Brian remembered the relief of all being back together as a single group, and wondered if it brought them closer together. ‘It reminds me of that sense of kinship you read about, when strangers have been through an experience together and they develop a bond. When it came down to it, we stuck together, didn’t we?’

Brian’s words stayed with me. Yes, the boys had stuck together, but the same couldn’t be said for the men.

For Sherif, remaining at the campsite was an unbearable prospect. The next day he wrote in his diary: ‘Talked with OJ and Jack in Panther campfire area from 2.00–5.30.’ They had sat on a log facing the cold fireplace. The day was overcast and the wind shivered the trees. Sherif sat with his elbows on his knees, smoking and staring into the fireplace. Harvey did most of the talking. Sherif didn’t take much persuading. ‘He was absolutely heartbroken,’ Harvey recalls. ‘But we all agreed we wanted to do it again. Sherif agreed that he had been pushing too hard and pushing all of us too hard and that he wasn’t the best one to be in charge.’ They went back and forth, ‘salving their wounds’, going over and over what had gone wrong. And what had gone right. ‘Jack and I told him we’d only do it again if I could be in charge.’

Sherif left the camp later that afternoon, leaving Harvey and White to dismantle what was left of the study.

When Doug heard the story of how the camp ended, he was thrilled. ‘I would have loved to have been part of that. I feel like I was there, talking about it. I’ve thought about it a lot the last few months: how it was just a few years after World War II, and atrocities and what people will do to others was not far from people’s minds, but to know that the boys had absorbed the sportsmanship concept — I think that’s what it is, anyway — to a greater extent than the combative concept is really appealing to me. It’s been a great opportunity to rethink a part of my life. It’s led me to think about a lot of things in different ways, good ways. It’s very uplifting!’

We were sitting on the couch, facing the window that looked over his lush summer garden. Doug pulled at the ears of his little black dog, resting at his feet. But what exactly his parents knew about the camp still bothers him. ‘I once described my memory of the camp as a “dark memory”: not sharp and vivid but murky, unpleasant.’ Doug paused and scratched the dog under the chin. ‘And no one in my family ever talked about it afterwards. It was not made part of our family history, which is very unusual — except for my dad’s experiences in World War II, our family talked about everything. But not this camp. It’s like my family blocked it as much as I blocked it.’

Doug, like all of the boys I’d spoken to, didn’t remember his parents telling him that it was anything other than a summer camp. But Doug thinks his father likely guessed. It’s a theory he came up with after talking it over with his brother and sister. ‘My father revered doctors his entire adult life. He was in the medical field — he was a pharmacist — and all his friends were doctors. But he considered psychiatrists and psychologist to be “quacks”, people who didn’t know what they were talking about, who were harmful and of no value. And I think it’s very possible that once he found out that he got duped into sending me off to this thing, he held that against the profession.’

But Brian believes his parents never knew, and he wondered about his own role in keeping them in the dark. ‘They would have asked me when I got home what it was like, and I wasn’t the kind of kid who kept secrets — not at that point, anyway.’ Perhaps he felt protective, I suggested, he didn’t want to make them feel guilty? But it was as if I hadn’t spoken. ‘I could talk to my mother about anything,’ Brian said. ‘Why didn’t I talk to her about this?’

Sherif set out to disprove theories that prejudice and conflict sprang from human nature, an authoritarian disposition, or a pathological personality, or were an expression of displaced frustration. Prejudice, hostility, and violence were the result of the attitudes and relationships between groups of people in society. Take a normal group of well-adjusted people who are friends, he argued, put them in groups competing against one another for a valued prize, and hostility, hatred, and even violence is inevitable. Friends will become enemies. For Sherif, the experiment was a failure because it did not deliver a scenario he had clear in his mind. In Sherif’s scheme of things, a ‘crucial’ test of his theory was that the ‘budding friendships’ between the boys in the first days of camp would be reversed.

But none of the men seemed to have noticed that the staff enacted their own scenario of group prejudice and conflict. Initially a cohesive team focused on the goal of a groundbreaking study, under the powerful personality of Sherif the staff group fractured, Kelman and Carper were shunned and sidelined, and Sussman became a scapegoat for Sherif’s frustration. The only violence in the camp was Sherif aiming to slug Sussman and Harvey threatening him with a block of wood.

I lost touch with Doug for a while after my visit. When I heard from him again he told me he’d been out of action, first in hospital, then for months in rehab. He’d been racing his mountain bike up a climb in the western part of New York State, ignoring the pain in his chest, until he collapsed with a heart attack. By the time they got him to the little local hospital, the staff decided he was ‘gone’, but a visiting cardio specialist injected him with ‘clot busters’ and saved him. He’d had a quintuple bypass requiring nine hours of open-heart surgery. After four months of rehab, he was just about to go back to work. He was playing it down, but it was clear that Doug had almost died.

‘You know, I don’t know if learning about this experiment had anything to do with it,’ Doug said in passing. Doug has a habit of saying serious things in a joking way that makes it hard to know whether to take him seriously or not, and by the time I’d drawn breath to follow this up, he’d moved on again. They say after open-heart surgery that all that handling and prodding of your heart makes you feel depressed. But was this what I had done too, prodding and poking around, getting into people’s memories, dredging up half-formed recollections they would have preferred to let lie?

Doug said that being off work and recuperating, he’d had a lot of time to think, and he’d come to a different conclusion about the experiment this time. ‘It was wrong, by which I mean not just poorly planned but poorly judged. They misunderstood human nature. They certainly misunderstood children. Ultimately they were able to manipulate children, but they were morally wrong. And that’s where I came down on it.’

So his feelings about it had changed?

‘Yes, and one of the things that changed it was having gone through my own health situation. I’ve learned from talking to somebody who gave me some great advice recently about this, that if you’ve had something significant happen to you — in this case it was trauma — the whole bit about going back through it cathartically is a mistake. All it does is make you relive it. It never diminishes it, it enhances it. It’s better to respect it, understand what happened, and then get on with your life because you didn’t die and you’re okay. Keep moving. And I think that translates to this camp thing for me a little bit. So while I was originally fascinated and glad, it doesn’t feel the same, it feels more like I was used. Not abused, but used. And that really makes me mad.’

I was struck by the shift in Doug’s mood, the sense of anger and loss. I felt responsible in the sense that here I was, years later, unwittingly caught up and catching Doug up too in the moral ambiguity of Sherif’s experiment and its legacy. It didn’t matter how much I tried to be objective, I was tangled in the net of this history and its consequences.

I thought of the other boys at this summer camp, who had bonded in the face of the men’s manipulation and defied the efforts of Sherif and the others to make them betray their friends and turn on them as enemies. Initially I construed that as a kind of victory, a triumph of the power of friendship to override adversity. A good-news story.

But the fact that the boys had resisted did not mean they weren’t affected by the experience. Perhaps they had all put the summer of 1953 out of their minds, and this explained why for the boys I had spoken to, it was an effort to recall. It hinted not just at the ravages of time and memory but also at a suppressing of something they preferred to forget. Their participation in an experiment they had been unable to truly consent to had come at a cost. Debriefing the boys had been out of the question, given that Sherif had decided to run the study again, so they were sent home carrying doubts, secrets, unanswered questions. And now my presence — the researcher, a character in the broader frame of this story — had prompted an unofficial reckoning for some of them.

How many other ‘lost boys’ did this era of social psychological experimentation generate, I wondered. How many psychological wounds were caused in the pursuit of scientific and historical understanding?