9

Sweet Harmony

Carolyn wrote excitedly to Sherif on the first day of the final stage of the experiment, telling him how tempted she had been to call. ‘According to schedule you must be through with fighting (experimentally) and heading towards sweet harmony!’

If only it were that easy.

Before the final stage could begin, Sherif wanted to gather hard data to support his anecdotal evidence that the experiment was working by bringing both groups together to test their attitudes to each other. Bob Hood told the Rattlers he’d made a bet with Jack White that the Rattlers were a better team than the Eagles in certain skills tests. But by now the Rattlers didn’t want anything to do with the others, and refused to participate. In desperation, Hood promised his group $5.00 if they took part. In a bean-tossing competition where the boys had to estimate how well their group did in comparison to the others, each group was much more positive about its own members and regarded themselves as superior in skill to the other team.

In the published version of the study, the men portray the final week of the camp as an epic struggle to overcome the aggression and fighting between the two groups of boys. They described how the boys, waiting for meals outside the mess hall, abused one another, and once inside at the table, ‘After eating for a while, someone threw something, and the fight was on. The fight consisted of throwing rolls, napkins rolled in a ball, mashed potatoes, etc. accompanied by yelling the standardized unflattering words at each other.’ Name-calling and abuse were a feature of every interaction, according to the book. And when things went wrong, the other group generally got the blame: ‘In an early morning swim … the Eagles had discovered their flag in the water, burned the previous evening by the Rattlers. Upon making this discovery, they denounced the Rattlers as “dirty bums”, and accused them … of throwing rocks in their creek (because one of them stubbed his toes a number of times during the swim).’

It makes for uncomfortable reading. Each time the two groups came into contact, whether it was to eat a meal or watch a movie, the men made notes on how they acted, where they sat, and the overall mood between them.

‘We were trying to show just being together doesn’t create peace. You need more than that,’ OJ said.

For the first day, mealtimes were bedlam. Boys on both sides ‘yelled invectives’ and threw food, the book says, while the men hid outside and took notes. On the second day, after joint meals in the mess hall, Ida the cook (who was wife of the camp’s permanent caretaker, Dave Bloxham) and her sister (who worked as kitchenhand) threatened to quit. They were ‘conservative churchgoing people’, OJ said. ‘She was so bothered by the misbehaviour of the boys, who were throwing food at the other group and cursing each other. The food fights and bad names really bothered the ladies, and they chided Sherif and I for allowing the boys to behave that way,’ OJ said. Ida’s husband Dave took her aside and explained. ‘To our surprise, he had pretty well mapped out what we were doing. He saw that we were trying to create discord and break it down and he had a chat with his wife and sister-in-law and talked them out of quitting.’

My guess was that the boys were angry and upset not only because they felt aggrieved by the cheating behaviour of their opponents but also because they felt betrayed by the camp’s staff. They were confused.

In their published accounts, it is as if the men have let a genie out of the bottle in this final week, but the reality was quite different. Boys on both sides were angry and upset. It made me wonder, how had things become so heated? And why were these boys at Robbers Cave so much more easily drawn into conflict than the boys a year earlier?

Dwayne Hall told me, in his gravelly smoker’s voice, that he thinks it was because all the usual rules were upended. ‘We — our group — we were playing by the rules. But that other team, the Rattlers? After a game, in the middle of the night they attack us and steal our stuff. That’s like —’ He can’t find the word for it. ‘Well, what do we do? We tell our counsellors because that’s not playing fair. We’re like, “You got to disqualify these guys.” But what do the counsellors do? Nothing. Maybe they’re the ones who suggest that we get our own back, maybe it was one of us, I don’t remember. But there was no way that the fighting between us was “natural”. It was crazy — a crazy situation run by crazy people!’ He sounded angry.

What had the others said about the camp, he wanted to know.

He was the only one of the Eagles group I’d managed to find, I told him.

‘Doesn’t matter which group,’ Dwayne said briskly. ‘We were all brought up to play fair and square. You can’t tell me that the boys in that other group didn’t feel bad, didn’t know what they were doing was wrong. I mean, there were these free-for-alls, like a riot or something. I mean, we felt under attack. We were filling our socks with rocks at night. So we were planning to retaliate. I mean, we had to look after ourselves because the counsellors weren’t going to.’

Did the Rattler boys feel betrayed by the men too? They were certainly resisting Bob Hood after the tournament. His inconsistency must have been confusing and upsetting: how he accompanied the Rattler boys on raids but then didn’t take their side when the Eagles clearly broke the rules during tug of war.

Bill Snipes doesn’t remember much about the fights but is confident that they occurred. ‘There was a lot of pushing and shoving. I guess we were pretty mad. Some kids were pretty upset. Our counsellor was with us all the time — they knew about it. How else would eleven-year-old boys hurt each other?’

On the second morning of the last week, when the boys lined up for breakfast, Ida came out from the kitchen and stood at the door to the mess hall to give them a piece of her mind. With all the extra cleaning up she and Ruth had to do because of the boys’ mess, the two had less time to cook. If the boys wanted to eat, they had to behave themselves, the small woman with the neat grey bun told them firmly.

Was it a coincidence that after breakfast that day the Rattlers took a stand against their bully? Back in their cabin, Red, with his penchant for picking on the smaller boys, pulled the comic out of the hands of a boy called Franklin, who was reading on his bunk. Franklin leapt up to grab it back. Red shoved him and Franklin fell backwards, hitting his head on the railing. Then Red was on top of him, punching him as Franklin kicked and cried underneath.

Bob Hood raced in and pulled the boys apart. I imagined the freckles on Red’s face stood out in bright blotches as he struggled free of Hood’s arms and ran out of the cabin. Hood hurried after him. The boys crowded around Franklin, who was rubbing his head and trying not to cry. When Bob Hood came back and asked if the boys knew where Red had gone, Hollis spoke up: ‘We’ll bring him back if you stay out of this.’ The boys drew in closer to stand behind Hollis.

The story is an awkward wrinkle in the smooth narrative of the experiment presented in The Robbers Cave Experiment: intergroup conflict and cooperation. But it’s stayed with OJ, and he tells the story with a kind of wonder at the boys’ solidarity. Clearly they had given up expecting the men to take Red in hand. I wondered if they had been inspired by Ida, who seemed the only one among the adults laying down any rules about right and wrong. Maybe it was Ida’s talk that gave them a burst of courage.

Hollis and Bill searched the camp and the woods and returned with Red an hour later. The boys adjourned to the mess hall with the rest of their group, with no adults allowed. The men only learned afterwards what happened.

‘They held a kangaroo court and kicked him out,’ OJ said. ‘Told him he couldn’t be part of the group until he apologised.’ But Red was stubborn. He returned to his hide-out in the bush.

Noon came and one of the smaller boys brought him a plate of food, ‘like a puppy’, OJ told me, and ‘[he] said, “All you’ve got to do is apologise and you can come back in,” but Red wasn’t having any of it. He spat at the boy’s feet and said nope, he was staying put, he wasn’t about to apologise.’ Red sulked alone all afternoon, but that night after supper, ‘he came limping into port and the boys made room for him at the table and continued with their card game. No one said anything. But he never bothered any of them again,’ OJ said admiringly, shaking his head. No wonder the men left this out of the published version of the experiment, I thought. How would they accommodate this in their story of the united and aggressive Rattlers?

After lunch, OJ told the boys to fill their water canteens because there seemed to be some problem with the water supply and he needed volunteers to help find the problem and fix it. So began the experiment’s final stage, where the men introduced superordinate goals or problems that the boys could only solve together, with the idea that this would restore relations between them. This time there had been no talk of setting a forest fire, I imagined because OJ was practical enough to realise it was a dangerous and unpredictable way to try to unite the boys.

In their groups, the boys, trying to find the problem, slowly traced the water line from the mess hall, up the mountain, to the water tank at the top, where that morning OJ and Sherif had buried the valve under a fall of rocks. Sherif made few notes on the day, busy following the boys up and down the line, pretending to be flummoxed by the problem and, like the boys, looking for a solution. At key moments, when the boys’ backs were turned, he took photos. The men had their hearts in their mouths, OJ told me, watching the boys move along the line, trying to find where and why the water had stopped flowing. ‘The whole idea was that they would have to work together to fix it,’ OJ said. ‘But we didn’t know if it was going to work. We were improvising.’

At the beginning ‘they were quite touchy about interacting’, but slowly, with the sun beating down and their water canteens slowly emptying, the boundaries between the groups began to blur. I pictured the Rattlers, free of the tension of Red’s bullying, were more relaxed than they had been for days, and the Eagles, anxious to put an end to the fighting, were ready to meet the others halfway.

When the boys finally found the valve buried under the rockslide at the top of the mountain, the groups took turns lifting and carrying the rocks away. But, realising there was a better and faster way of getting the job done, they soon formed a chain, passing the rocks down the line and working as a single team. In the photos you can see the boys standing on the ladder and clambering over the top of the water tank. I thought about how hot it was at Robbers Cave in July — how the metal from the water tank would radiate heat and would burn to the touch, the ground around it dry and dusty — but the boys clambered eagerly over the tank and stood peering up at it at different rungs on its metal ladder. They were clearly motivated, and pleased to be able to help.

By sundown, however, after three hours in the sun lifting and hauling rocks, the boys were exhausted. ‘We’d done too good a job on those rocks,’ OJ said with a laugh. ‘In the end we had to solve it. They needed our help, so we helped them lift off the final rocks.’ With the water supply restored, and as much cold mountain water to drink as the boys wanted, supper that evening was a relatively ‘calm’ affair. ‘There was some joking between the boys, although things were still a little strained. But it was the beginning of the breakdown of the antagonism.’

Despite the others’ tiredness, Sherif was full of energy. ‘He was elated,’ OJ said. ‘We both were. We could have pulled those rocks off single-handed we were so pleased.’ He laughed. ‘He was an egalitarian guy. He was against competition because it creates prejudice and inequality. Now we had created a situation where groups would work together and break it down.’

But it was just the beginning, the tentative first steps. ‘We didn’t get ahead of ourselves,’ OJ said. ‘We had to come up with other things to get eleven-year-old boys to cooperate. We were saying, “What on earth are we gonna do next?”’ You wouldn’t know it from the published description of the final week that it was the result of last-minute planning.’ The next day, the men announced that their budget didn’t cover the full cost of hiring the movie Treasure Island, so the groups pooled their money; the day after, they went camping together at a lake. ‘They got one tent up and they didn’t have time to put the second one up before a very severe storm came over, as if we’d ordered it,’ OJ recounted and chuckled. I imagine that sheltering in one tent for the night, with the excuse of the storm, allowed the boys a chance to make friends without loss of face.

The last event for the week was a trip to Arkansas. The boys were told there would be two trucks, with a group in each truck. All of them were excited at the prospect of crossing the border into another state. The Rattlers were so keen that they wanted to leave without breakfast. But that would have spoiled the men’s plan. After the boys had eaten, OJ announced solemnly that one of the trucks was out of action: ‘We only have one truck fit to take campers to Arkansas so we might have to give up on the idea of going.’ Over the boys’ cries of disappointment one boy yelled, ‘We can all go in one truck, OJ!’ and the others joined in. Sherif noted that a couple of boys were silent and seemed resistant to the idea, but they were swamped by the general enthusiasm. It would have been near impossible for OJ not to grin, or glance over at Sherif, who I pictured hovering by the door, wiping his hands on a rag as if he had been looking under the bonnet of a broken-down truck.

It was a three-hour drive, and they stopped halfway, at the small town of Heavener, for a drink. By now Sherif and OJ were elated. While the boys drank sodas in the town’s drugstore, Sherif bought a card at the counter and scrawled a quick note to Carolyn on the back, signalling the study’s success. ‘Dearest, the boys (members of the two groups) are having pops together in this drugstore in Heavener after their joint overnight camp. All going to Arkansas. Love M.’ Then, scribbled in haste along the edge of the card, he added, ‘See you tomorrow evening.’

Soon after returning to the road, they reached the state line and OJ pulled over. The boys piled out and gathered round a metal sign hanging off a plank, which read ‘Arkansas Welcomes You’, and one of the men snapped a picture. In the photo, a couple of the boys are looking upwards at a large boy, who has climbed to the top of the sign and is hanging upside down above their heads. I can’t tell if he’s a redhead, but it looks like the sort of thing Red would do. Only this time no one paid him much attention. The boys lined up, and one stood in the middle with his legs wide apart, with one foot in Oklahoma and the other in Arkansas, straddling the border of the familiar and the strange.

When they arrived at their destination — the small town of Waldron, in Arkansas — the boys jostled and laughed together over lunch in a diner, and in his notes Sherif wrote in happy capitals, ‘EXPERIMENT ENDED AT THIS POINT.’

‘We were delighted, just delighted with the outcome,’ OJ said. ‘Sherif challenged the idea that individuals are the problem or that they are inherently antagonistic. We created factions — we showed that by putting a group of normal eleven-year-old WASP boys in competition for highly desirable goals, you could mould them into factions. Then you could dissolve them again. It was an idealistic sort of thing for us, and we really felt we had a cure for our problems. We were fighting prejudice. But it was so busy that we didn’t have time to stop and savour it — we just had to keep going.’

On the bus on the way back to Oklahoma City, the boys took turns in singing songs they’d performed during camp skits, with Bill Snipes accompanying them on the ukulele and leading the singing. As they got close, everyone ‘rushed’ to the front of the bus to join in singing Rodgers and Hammerstein’s ‘Oklahoma’. ‘Everyone in both groups took part, all sitting or standing as close together as possible in the front end of the bus.

‘The gaiety lasted during the last half hour of the trip; no one went back to the rear. A few boys exchanged addresses, and many told their closest companions that they would meet again’, The Robbers Cave Experiment concludes. It may well have been a triumphant moment for the men, but was it for the boys too? Did it mark the end of a fun and happy camp, or was their elation at least in part sheer relief that they were finally heading home and leaving the strange place that was Robbers Cave?

I understood now why Bill’s memories of the camp veered between cheerful recall of happy times and the uneasy memories of the raids and the fighting. One of Bill’s vivid memories was of a moment after they had left Robbers Cave for Arkansas. All twenty boys sat in the back of the truck, excited to be going to another state. The vehicle had a canvas tarp, and as they drove along the dirt road, dust blew back at them. Soon they were covered in it, their faces coated in the same brown mask. Opposite Bill, Red’s pale, freckled skin and fiery thatch of hair was brown with dirt. ‘I remember looking at that boy Red, the way his white eyelashes looked against the dust. And I remember thinking we all looked exactly the same,’ Bill said. The differences between them had been obliterated. What’s stayed with him is that final image, perhaps a vision of the camp as he had hoped it would be when he first arrived — a bunch of boys making new friends, who saw their similarities and not their differences, setting out together on a new adventure.

The 160-mile trip to Robbers Cave that OJ and Sherif made back in 1954 would have taken a lot longer than it does today, but still we left Oklahoma City early in the morning so we could make it there and back in a day.

Cherie, Bill’s wife, drove us in her neat white Toyota hatchback. Bill had been cautious the first time I spoke to him about the experiment. Yes, he remembered the camp, he said. No, he didn’t know it was an experiment. The words were familiar to me by then.

The traffic was light and we made good time, but after a while the double-laned highway narrowed to a single road and we passed gas stations, the occasional small town. Cherie and Bill pointed out the signs to the Okemah, where Woody Guthrie was born. The names of the towns are poetic: Shawnee, Keokuk Falls, Henryetta.

Robbers Cave in 1954 was Bill’s first experience of summer camp, and he was looking forward to going back with me. He has a degree in sociology and psychology, and although he could not remember ever reading about the experiment during his studies, he was tickled pink to think he was part of something that’s now in textbooks.

‘I enjoyed that camp,’ he told me. ‘I had a great time.’ Bill grinned at the memory. I was unsettled by this cheerful impression because it sat strangely with his and others’ accounts of the fights and violence. Until Bill explained. ‘My parents didn’t have a lot of money,’ he turned in his seat to tell me. The camp was a holiday for Bill that his parents would not normally be able to afford.

He hadn’t been back this way in a long time, Bill said. He was clearly excited about this trip. Even his last visit down this way had been dramatic and frightening. In 1973, he and a bevy of officers from Oklahoma City got news there were riots at the state penitentiary and raced along the highway to get there. When they arrived, the place was on fire. It was chaos. The riots lasted for three days and left three dead and twenty-one injured. Twelve buildings burned to the ground. Bill didn’t say much more, and I found it hard to imagine him raising a hand to anyone, let alone a baton or a gun.

We knew we were getting close to McAlester when we passed the state penitentiary. A sign by the side of the highway warned, ‘Hitchhikers may be escaping prisoners’, and I pondered the ambiguities of this statement all the way to McAlester. We parked at the small town of McAlester, the last stop before the turn-off, and had lunch in a diner with plastic tablecloths.

I guessed it was not often that Bill and Cherie got this far from Oklahoma City, and by this point I had caught the same mood of adventure they shared. I was grateful for their generosity in taking a total stranger on an outing like this, and on McAlester’s main street, we took turns posing for photos beside a man-sized fish standing upright on the pavement outside the angler’s shop. On the wall beside the shop, a poster advertised the annual Wild West Festival, which pays homage to the town’s early beginnings, with a High Noon showdown, rope tricks, and a rodeo. Anyone looking at us would have thought we were ordinary tourists. But we weren’t. For Bill, this was a chance to relive an early episode in his life. For me, it was an opportunity to visit the park for the first time with one of the boys as my guide.

When we stopped for petrol on our way out of McAlester, I spied a weekly newspaper in the rack called OK Jailbirds, which seemed to publish the mugshots and details of crimes for which people across the state had been arrested. I picked up a copy partly for its novelty value. Flipping through it, looking at the faces of alleged rapists, murderers, petty criminals, and paedophiles, I thought, These are the kinds of people Bill has worked with all his adult life. But he had none of the cynicism or seriousness I associated with someone who had done the job that long. He had a positively buoyant nature.

After we took the turn-off, the road slowly started to climb. The trees rose on either side of the road, and the flat grey landscape of the highway was replaced by a lush quiet forest. Finally, we turned into the entrance, Cherie parked the car, and we climbed out. Immediately we were hit by a wall of heat: it was like standing in front of an open oven door. Cherie and I wanted to stop in the shade and read the information boards at the park’s entrance, to look at the tourist map and its faded black-and-white photos of famous outlaws, but Bill was impatient and hurried us on.

Trees shaded the road that snaked through the park, connecting the lower half, with the lake, to the upper half, with its cabins and cave. There was no one else around; we had the place to ourselves.

‘There was nothing around it,’ Bill had said on the drive, describing the cave to us. ‘We climbed over these big granite boulders, twenty, maybe thirty feet in the air. They came out of the earth on a slant and you climbed up on them. You could climb real high.’ For eleven-year-old Bill, this first week of the camp, exploring the park and climbing over and around the cave, had been a real adventure. He couldn’t wait to get up there again.

We followed the signs to the cave. Almost immediately the path began to climb, but it passed under thick trees so I couldn’t see where it ended. It was mid-afternoon, and we stopped often to catch our breath. Bill was the first to admit he was out of shape — unlike Cherie, who was fit and active. We took our time, stopping and resting and starting again. The trail was marked in fluorescent yellow, spots that in places had faded away or been obscured by bush. I expected to descend to find a cave: it seemed counterintuitive to be climbing upwards towards something I knew plunged deep into a mountain. It was an odd parallel of the feeling I had about Bill, who was treating the outing as a nostalgic trip to a place of his boyhood. How could he have enjoyed an experience that sounded so unhappy?

When we got to the top, it was exactly as Bill had described it. The trees cleared and we came to a flat plate of rock that jutted out above a valley, surrounded on all sides by forest. Up here, the road we’d driven in on was invisible, and on the rock we could look out across a wooded valley and to the Ouachita Mountains. Insects hummed in the otherwise silent wood as we wiped the sweat from our faces. We seemed to be the only people for miles around.

Bill was disappointed that we couldn’t get closer to the cave, but barriers had been erected around it to prevent the public from entering. Looking at the cave mouth from where we stood on a wooden walkway, I could see how the light stopped abruptly just inside, swallowing the sun in a thick darkness.

‘We used to climb down to there.’ He pointed to one side of the cave’s entrance. ‘It was really steep, and we’d slide down in there. You didn’t know how far you were going to go. It was very dark … But it was fun,’ Bill protested quickly when he saw Cherie and I exchanging glances. ‘We had stakeouts. We found some great hiding places. I had a great time.’

Bill’s face was shiny with sweat and he was still puffing from the climb. We decided to take a break before we began the descent.

I climbed back up on top of the rock, above the cave. I could see why ten- and eleven-year-old boys would have loved this place. Standing on the slab of sandstone jutting out across the valley, I could imagine that Jesse James stood in the same spot, keeping a lookout, back in the days when there were ‘cowboys’ and ‘Indians’. There was a kind of spell over the place. To city boys like Bill, it must have seemed magical.

I could hear Bill talking loudly below me. ‘Guess what I’m doing?’ He sat on a rock, his face pink, a cell phone to his ear. ‘I’m climbing a mountain! I’m finally gonna get into shape.’ He chuckled. One of his daughters, clearly incredulous on the other end of the line, was making him laugh.

The stone-and-wood cabins looked exactly as they did in the 1954 photos. The camp caretaker unlocked the door of one and let us have a look around inside. The park is busy in the cooler months, when the snakes are not active and the weather is bearable rather than blistering, and she told us they often rent the cabins to families, former school classmates, or members of church groups who camped here together in their younger days and now return for reunions. But the cabin I was in smelled as if it hadn’t been used in a while; it was musty and crowded, with old wooden bunk beds harbouring yellowing mattresses. Bill swore it was the one the Rattlers had slept in, and outside he headed off through the trees, over a creek, to the Eagles’ cabin.

Bill made a slow circle around it. ‘I remember when I came through that window, Davey Munroe’s eyes were out on stalks. He was not happy, he was real kind of upset.’ Bill looked troubled at the memory. He stopped, and Cherie handed him a bottle of water. ‘You know I played football with Davey Munroe at college?’ He unscrewed the bottle and took a sip.

‘You did?’ It was the first instance I’d encountered of any of the boys crossing paths in later life, and I was excited.

Bill shook his head. ‘It’s the strangest thing. We talked a lot about other things, but we never mentioned this camp. You’d think we would, wouldn’t you?’

‘Maybe he didn’t want to remember you falling on top of him,’ Cherie joked.

But Bill went on as if she hadn’t spoken. ‘I mean, this is where we met, and every time I saw him I would think about this camp. I just don’t know why we never got together and talked about it.’ He looked at me hopefully. ‘Boy, I would love to meet up with those fellas again.’

Bill returned to this topic like a tongue at a sore tooth, and we talked about it a number of times over the next couple of days, but he wasn’t able to explain it any better than this first time. ‘I have no idea why Davey and I never talked about it,’ he said, shaking his head sorrowfully. ‘Or why I never stayed in touch with these guys!’ This is not at all characteristic for Bill. This is the man who meets for coffee every Thursday with his friends from elementary school to reminisce and catch up on gossip. Bill is clearly proud of these longstanding friendships. Which is why he’s so bothered by Robbers Cave.

And yet Bill recalls so much detail — not just the description of the cave, but the first week exploring and playing, the bully Red, the night raids, and finally the happy end stage, where the boys all seemed to get along, and Bill led the singalongs on the way back home, playing his ukulele.

I wouldn’t be able to put Bill together with Davey Munroe, but I had managed to track down another boy from Bill’s Rattler group. Maybe meeting and talking would put whatever it was that was bothering Bill to rest.

Smut Smith had been on Google, reading about the experiments, ever since I first made contact. He was excited to see himself online in a picture at the head of a group playing tug of war. ‘I said, “That’s me!” I called my wife over to look and she said, “No doubt about it, that’s you.”’

Smut has a strong Oklahoma accent and lives in Edmond, not far from Bill Snipes, although they haven’t seen each other since 1954. ‘We really had fun,’ he told me. ‘We swam a lot. We had our own pond, and even though there were snakes in the water, we’d make a lot of noise and splash around a lot so they wouldn’t come near.’

What were the experimenters trying to find out, he wanted to know. I gave him a brief rundown and he was silent for a while. Then he said slowly, ‘I remember the rivalry. I remember we tried real hard to win in all these games. But it seemed they had better athletes, and they dominated us. We didn’t like that. I remember we ganged up against them and plotted out strategies, but I can’t remember the specifics.

‘I remember I made some good friends, some real buddies. But I remember one guy, he was a real bully. He was bigger than anyone else and was always pushing people around.’ Smut veered between recounting the conflict with Red and with the other group. But both he and Bill returned to Red a number of times.

The other thing he remembered was the relief when it was over. ‘We were there for three weeks, and I didn’t realise how homesick I was until I saw my folks. I remember crying when I saw them again.’

He was voluble on the phone, excited that he was in what someone had told him was ‘a world-famous experiment’. I would have thought he would be keen to meet one of the other boys, but although he agreed, I sensed some reluctance.

A week later, Bill and I met Smut at the Cracker Barrel, a chain restaurant that boasts traditional home cooking, located halfway between Oklahoma City and Edmond. I took a photo of them together before we went inside. Smut, tall and straight and fair-haired, in a polo shirt, smiled in a restrained kind of way. Beside him, Bill, short and stout, in a loud Hawaiian shirt, grinned widely, but I was surprised by how nervous he seemed. Inside, waitresses in long gingham aprons took our orders. The conversation proceeded in fits and starts. Both men had brought their wives. Bill asked Smut what line of work he was in, and they exchanged details of college and careers. I realised what a thin thread tied these two men together. Smut was reserved, cautious. Bill too seemed wary. I was fiddling with the straw in my drink, wondering why Smut had agreed to meet us if there was so little to talk about, when Bill mentioned the frog. Smut’s head came up and his glasses flashed.

‘You remember that canoe?’ Bill said, grinning.

‘Pfft.’ Smut was dismissive. ‘Six or eight of us in it.’

‘That counsellor with the horn-rimmed glasses —’

‘He was with us a lot,’ Smut said. ‘I remember he was trim.’

‘Around my dad’s age,’ Bill said.

‘And that terrible noise.’ Smut grimaced, laughing.

‘I never saw anything like it. That frog was the size of a saucer!’

‘We floated right up to it.’

‘Each snake with a hind leg in its mouth, and rest of snake strung back out on the water —’

‘That frog was trying to get loose. Awful noise, wasn’t it?’

‘And that counsellor drew a pistol.’

Both men laughed.

‘It was exciting,’ Bill said.

‘Sure was,’ replied Smut.

They were silent for a minute.

‘You think he shot that frog,’ Bill said, ‘or did he kill the snakes?’

‘Hard to tell,’ Smut said.

They mulled it over a while, jiggling straws in their drinks. Had the man saved the frog or killed it? Was he villain or hero, friend or foe?

‘They studied us,’ Smut said. ‘What did they determine from their studies? What were they trying to find out?’

It dawned on me why they might have been nervous about meeting. They sensed that the experiment had been a kind of test. But whether they had they passed or failed, and what the men had learned about them: that they didn’t know. When they looked to me to explain the experiment, I reiterated what they already knew, that it had been about how you could bring groups to war, and then bring them round to peace again. What I left out was that Sherif later defined it as a kind of moral test that the boys had failed.

I felt sure this doubt about the experiment’s significance was at the heart of Bill’s uneasiness. Perhaps he hoped in meeting one of the other boys to find the answer, but it seemed to me that Smut was cautious too and might have been bothered by the same questions.

Despite the final reconciliatory stage, where the boys merged into a single harmonious group, the Robbers Cave boys are famous for their supposed transformation, in Sherif’s words, from ‘cream of the crop’ to ‘disturbed, vicious … youngsters’. And if you read Sherif’s description of the experiment and the version repeated in psychology textbooks, you get the same story.

But how was it that the boys at Robbers Cave turned on one another in this way? They were no less ‘normal’ than the boys from New York State. They were the same age, and while they were poorer and from down south, it seemed unlikely that socioeconomic background or geography explained the change.

The hypothesis and design in 1954 were different: in Oklahoma, Sherif and his team had dispensed with any attempt to convert friends into enemies. The two groups had no chance to make friends before the competition started — even though the boys had tried, they’d been blocked from developing intergroup relationships. Jack White’s refusal to invite the other group into the birthday party got the tournament off to a hostile start. Unlike the year before, the norms of good sportsmanship soon dissolved, as at Robbers Cave both groups typecast their opponents as cheaters. The Eagles sat down during the tug of war, which was against the rules. The Rattlers trashed the Eagles’ cabin the night before cabin inspection to gain an edge in the competition.

Was it also the behaviour of the researchers that was different this time round? I revisited the staff instructions and noticed Kelman’s original directives had been revised for the 1954 study and contained new ordinances. Once boys decided on a ‘line of action’, the book noted, staff could ‘give them help to carry it out’ and ‘give advice’. In contrast to the 1953 study, where staff were instructed to stay at arm’s length and not ‘influence’ the campers, this time staff could take a more active role. The boys were likely ‘to turn to you, as adults, for approval or sanction’, and as long as the boys’ actions ‘do not run counter to the criteria for a given stage’, staff were allowed to give the OK for them to go ahead. But exactly what behaviour the men could permit and encourage, and what they would forbid, the instructions didn’t say. So they had more leeway to shape the group’s behaviour in line with the experiment’s hypotheses and to move things along. Remembering how much pressure OJ said they were under, I wasn’t really surprised. There’d been a few instances when I was going through the materials where it seemed to me that staff were clearly crossing a line, but I could see now that they were within the rubbery boundaries of the directions they’d been given.

A year earlier, Jim Carper had made a habit of ensuring the whole group voted and came to a unanimous decision on any action they wanted to take, but there’s no mention of this process at Robbers Cave. So just exactly how many boys had to suggest flag burning before staff ‘gave a hand’? I thought of the matches that mysteriously appeared when the Eagles boys stood around the Rattlers’ flag, and how, if following these instructions, it would have been acceptable for the men to help them set the flag alight.

So where exactly did the line between staff intervention begin and end? Surely the men’s involvement in and approval of retaliation and vandalism had influenced the boys’ behaviour? Bob Hood not only didn’t reprimand his Rattler group for trashing property but also accompanied them on the night raid and took photos. The men blocked behaviour that might run counter to their hypotheses too: after the first raid, the Eagles suggested a peaceful resolution to Jack White, asking for the Rattler group to be disqualified from the tournament, but White suggested they sabotage the Rattlers to even the score.

How much of the groups’ ‘initiative’ originated with the boys and how much with the men? Whose idea was the night raid, the smearing of their faces with soot ‘commando style’? How long did Bob Hood and Jack White use the excuse of a bet with each other to motivate their groups to win? The observation notes weren’t nearly as informative as a source for me this time round. They were much shorter, and fulfilled a different function too. Instead of trying not to pay selective attention, as Herbert Kelman had urged in the earlier study, this time the men were urged to do the opposite: ‘The ongoing activities will present the possibility of an infinite number of events that could be observed and recorded. Therefore, please have the hypotheses for the given stage focal in your mind so that observations will not be hodgepodge but will be relevant to the hypotheses in question …’

One of Sherif’s major predictions, and the one that has made Robbers Cave famous, is the apparently spontaneous mistrust and hostility that erupted between the groups during the tournament, and the apparent inevitability of the fighting that broke out when the Eagles group won the prize. But rather than competition causing conflict at Robbers Cave, it was the intervention of the men setting the groups against one another that added fuel to the fire. The year before, Kelman objected to these ‘frustration situations’ organised by the staff to increase hostility between the boys, calling them ‘a serious violation’ of the experimental design. In the 1953 study, the staff, playing agent provocateurs, created incidents so that one group of boys would mistakenly attribute it as an attack from the other boys. Their interventions had been relatively benign — mixing up clothing, cutting a flagpole rope — but neither group took the bait. At Robbers Cave, Sherif and his team upped the ante. But the hostility between the boys couldn’t be explained as a byproduct of the competition; it was because they felt under attack. They fought one another not because one group won the tournament but because they had been violated, their flags burned, their huts raided, their prizes stolen.

It seemed to me that what happened at Robbers Cave wasn’t a test of a theory so much as a choreographed enactment, with the boys as the unwitting actors in someone else’s script.

The men had encouraged hostility and fighting. Now I thought I could see why OJ would so vividly remember the ‘kangaroo court’ and why it was not included in the final report on the experiment. I thought I understood why some of the Rattler boys, such as Bill and Hollis, had kept the men away when they wanted to take Red in hand. The men had never stepped in to protect boys in either group from Red’s bullying and aggression. If anything, they rewarded him for it. It seemed no coincidence to me that the afternoon these boys banished Red and stripped him of his power was the same in which the two groups made tentative steps towards friendship. Sherif might have put it down to the power of a superordinate goal, but I read it as the boys restoring rules that the men had broken.

When I tried to pin OJ down on just how much of a role the men played in generating friction between boys, he said, ‘I might be biased, but I think the Robbers Cave study was clean. We introduced manipulations and then we stepped aside.’ But this bothered me. How could they both manipulate and step aside?

‘What we told them was they’d have to do things safely. We made it very clear that they could essentially do what they wanted as long as no one got hurt.’

I thought how frightening that idea must have been to some of the children. They were in a remote rural wilderness with men who intimated there were few holds barred and where the values of home and church and school had no force. Respect and fairness were discouraged. Cursing, bullying, cheating, and fighting were rewarded. And in the notes of The Robbers Cave Experiment, the boys’ misery and resentment spills across the pages.

There was a kind of naivety at work here in OJ’s response that surprised me. In an experiment about group influence and inequities in power, the men seemed blind to their own role as a powerful group in the camp. On one hand, they acknowledged how they engineered events and set up misinformation so that one group would get angry with the other and retaliate. But they couldn’t, or wouldn’t, see that their non-intervention was in itself an action that sent a powerful message to the children. The fact that they did nothing to prevent or put a stop to the name-calling and the cursing, the food throwing, the vandalism, and the raids communicated their approval and encouragement. How could they state that they had manipulated the boys’ interactions at the same time as arguing that the boys’ behaviour was ‘natural’? I was surprised, too, that someone like OJ could be so insightful in some ways but not have reflected on this.

Sherif used the term ‘hypothesis’ in his descriptions of what he planned for this research, but I was struck in reading his research proposals and outlines that there was nothing tentative about his predictions. The book that resulted from the 1954 Robbers Cave study describes a surprisingly neat scenario that proceeds smoothly through each stage, in vivid contrast to the Middle Grove study the year before:

… in testing our main hypotheses, we supplemented the observational method with sociometric and laboratory-like methods. One distinctive feature of this study was introducing, at choice points, laboratory-like techniques to assess emerging attitudes through indirect, yet precise indices. Such laboratory-like assessment of attitudes is based on the finding that under relevant conditions, simple judgments or perceptions reflect major concerns, attitudes and other motives of man.

Despite the often dry and scientific language of passages like this in their book and an emphasis on careful testing, Sherif’s study was not an experiment in the sense of an investigation, a gathering of evidence or proof. Sherif’s theory, already elaborated and developed, was the road map. The job of the research staff was to follow it.

So Sherif had a clear idea from the outset of what would happen, I asked OJ. ‘Oh, he had a definite script in mind, all right. His mind was not open. It was most definitely made up. And it was me who looked after the logistics, who made it happen.’ I was taken aback by how matter of fact and unapologetic he was about it. As if there was no question that this was the job of the research team, to deliver on the scenario they had already envisaged, like stagehands to a director.

I remembered the first time I came across a groundbreaking paper on the ethics of psychological research, when I was researching my book about Stanley Milgram. The paper was written by a professor called Herbert Kelman, and titled ‘Human Use of Human Subjects: the problem of deception in social psychological experiments’. Published in 1967, it was an in-depth discussion of what psychologists should and shouldn’t do in the name of social psychological research with human subjects. Before then, published discussion of the ethics of deceiving people about the purposes of an experiment was rare, and Kelman’s paper was a watershed moment.

I read the paper in preparation for my interview with him in Boston in 2013. Part of the text reads, ‘There is something disturbing about the idea of relying on massive deception as the basis for developing a field of inquiry’ as it ‘establishes the reputation of psychologists as people who cannot be believed’. So when I met Herb Kelman, I was eager to find out if this influential paper was inspired by his experience working on Sherif’s summer-camp experiment.

‘I’d never made that connection,’ he said with surprise. ‘If I was still in therapy now, that’s something I’d take to my therapist. I’ve written a lot about ethics of experimentation, but this study never figured in my thinking — you’ve just opened up a question for me. I really do think now that you raise it that there are serious ethical questions about it — there’s a difference between deceiving them in the course of a one-hour experiment and deceiving them about a three-week experience. I think you’re absolutely right. I’m sorry I’m not in analysis right now; I’d take it up with my analyst: How come this hasn’t figured?’

Perhaps it didn’t matter that he hadn’t made the connection consciously; his paper fanned a public debate about ethics that would change the way psychological research was conducted. After talking to OJ Harvey about both experiments it seemed to me that he and Sherif did not consider the ethical implications of their studies. They considered the boys’ physical safety — the risk of snakes, bug bites, black eyes — at the same time that the observation notes showed that there was evidence of the boys’ emotional turmoil, the boys’ crying, praying, and bullying. How could they notice such behaviour and not worry about its effects?

There was a kind of double vision at work here. To his professional peers, Sherif described the study as about nations, states, hostility, and conflict. But to anyone concerned about the ethics of the research, Sherif argued that the hostility between the boys was little more than schoolboy rivalry:

The competitive situation consists of games which boys enjoy playing. The enthusiasm in the activity and in opposition to the out-group in our work has been by no means more, and probably less, than can be observed on any street corner or school between rival cliques or school teams composed of normal healthy boys. For example, here in Norman the football game between McKinley and Lincoln gradeschools engenders greater excitement than the situations I specified in my experimental outline …

This denial of the boys’ experience extended beyond the study. OJ told me that Bob Hood regularly talked about the experiment in his teaching at the University of Oklahoma. After one of his psychology classes in the 1960s, a student approached Hood to say that he was one of the subjects. But Hood brushed him off and told him he was mistaken.

In the lobby of the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City is a huge white sculpture of a Native American slumped over his horse, his lance hanging uselessly from his hand. Both man and horse look defeated and on the brink of death. The plaque reads ‘The End of the Trail’, and I was contemplating why this sculpture of a dying American Indian was given such a prominent place in the museum when my phone rang.

I’d left a message for him three weeks earlier, but Dwayne hadn’t called me back. All I knew about him was he worked for a company that makes medical devices and that he sounded businesslike and rather brisk. I was pleased to hear from him, and the last thing I was going to do was tell him that now wasn’t the best time. I took my phone outside and sat on a chair at the edge of the museum café, away from a table of grey-haired tourists in glowing white sneakers. Since we last spoke, he had started reading the book about the experiment and had waited till he finished it before he rang me back.

I felt a clutch of anxiety to hear that Dwayne had read the book, and I realised how protective I was beginning to feel about these adult men. I’d worried about what it might feel like to recognise yourself in The Robbers Cave Experiments, how it could be upsetting to learn you could say or do things that you didn’t know you had in you. It was one of the reasons I had been reluctant to recommend the book to those men I spoke to. It was written to emphasise the way the staff simply stood back and let things take their course, and in reading it, one could easily believe that the boys weren’t manipulated.

But not Dwayne. ‘They were out to prove a point, weren’t they? It didn’t seem very scientific to me. I mean, what did they prove — that you can set things up so people will argue and fight? That’s news?’ There was an edge of impatience in his voice.

‘You encouraged the others in your group to pray before games,’ I said.

‘I bet I did,’ he said dryly.

‘You’re not still —?’

‘No!’ he laughed. ‘That was my parents’ influence. I grew up going to church, but I gave it up in my teens. I was a “troubled teen”.’ He put emphasis on the phrase. ‘I gave my parents a terrible time — stopped going to church, got in with a gang. For a while I even dropped out of school.’ As if he’d read my mind, he said, ‘I’d love to blame it on this camp, and who knows, you know, maybe all that fighting they had us involved in did something. I don’t really believe that, but it’s always been a bit of a mystery to me: where did I get the idea — this mild little goofy kid — where did I get the idea just a couple of years later that it was okay to solve problems with my fists? Don’t think I haven’t thought of it since all this came up.’

He said something else, but there was a burst of laughter from the tourist table and I missed it. ‘Sorry, could you repeat that?’

‘They thought they were doing the right thing, my folks,’ he said, clearing his throat. ‘They were eager to send me. They thought it would be good for me, you know.’ There was real sorrow in his voice. ‘I guess I learned to stand up for myself, that not everybody plays fair.’

Chairs scraped. The tourists were leaving.

‘How did they get away with it?’ Dwayne wanted to know.

After I got off the phone, I wandered around the museum, among tributes to rodeo stars and stunt riders, but I wasn’t concentrating. I was thinking about Dwayne with a vague sense of uneasiness, as if I’d done something to be ashamed of. Perhaps in looking for these lost boys I had been just as blind to my own motivations as Sherif appears to have been, and I was blithely stirring up old hurts. It seemed that as far Sherif and OJ were concerned, as long as no boy was physically injured, everything was fine. They ignored the boys’ emotional states almost entirely, except insofar as they had a direct bearing on the success of the experiments.

But, from that early, casual afternoon in the archives, over time I had become just as single-minded in my quest to find the boys and establish some link between their experiences at the camp and their later life. I’d set out to discover how the boys involved were affected then and later, and how the experience had changed them. I had a theory, a hypothesis, that perhaps they carried some hidden legacy from the experiment that shaped who they were today. I’d thought of them as lost boys in the sense that they had a missing part of their childhood that as a researcher I could restore to them. But without realising they didn’t know they’d been experimented on, I had blundered in, not always duly considering that the information I was delivering might be intrusive or unwelcome. Or that the news they were part of an experiment could disrupt their sense of themselves and their life story in ways that took time to unfold. Absorbing this information and making sense of it was a process.

The next morning I prowled my hotel room, checking emails, flitting between internet tabs, waiting for something that I couldn’t name. I went for a walk through Oklahoma City’s old warehouse district, down along the canal, hoping that physical exertion would settle my restlessness. But the further I got — past the ballpark and Mickey Mantle Plaza of Bricktown; along the shaded canal, with its early morning emptiness — the more convinced I became that I’d missed something. I stopped and watched a man step onto a canal boat, holding the hand of a small boy who struggled and tried to pull away, clearly wanting to get on the boat by himself. I thought of the boys, now men, I had interviewed and the painful new knowledge that they had been deceived, and I thought of the man who had deceived them. Muzafer Sherif inspired and attracted a dedicated team of researchers, yet none of his male colleagues I’d spoken to so far remembered his charm or garrulousness as much as his demanding temperament and drive. I realised that despite all my research, Muzafer Sherif remained a troubling and enigmatic figure to me.

Was he just so driven by ambition or idealism that he was blind to anything else? But he undermined his own study on many occasions with his self-destructive behaviour, his inability to manage staff, his drinking. Could there perhaps be a psychological scar in his own past that could explain his apparent lack of compassion for the boys? Who knew? He spent his formative years in Turkey, I knew that, but apart from this rudimentary detail, for all the hours I had spent examining the files and the documents, reading this man’s letters and notes, there was still a mystery at the centre of the story, and that mystery was Sherif. He had heart and soul invested in this group research, but I wasn’t any closer to understanding why. I wouldn’t understand the story of the Robbers Cave until I came closer to understanding the mystery of the man who orchestrated it.