14

The Museum of Innocence

In 1975, Muzafer Sherif wrote to OJ Harvey out of the blue. They had been largely out of touch for a number of years, beyond exchanging occasional cards at Christmas. But in 1975 Sherif, in an apparently buoyant frame of mind, wrote saying how ‘terribly good’ he felt about the Robbers Cave experiment and how ‘rejuvenated’ he was when he thought about it:

The more I think about it … the more I realize how much [the experiment] owes to you. Without your utmost participation, your resourcefulness, sound judgments and down to earth arrangements it couldn’t possibly be carried through to its culmination. I just wanted to convey to you this strong feeling and my gratitude to you.

It was the first time that Sherif had acknowledged this to Harvey, although in 1967, at a talk at the University of North Dakota, he described the Robbers Cave study as ‘the crowning one, done where the best things are done, in Oklahoma by Indians’.

It was a rare time — perhaps the only time in Sherif’s professional life when he ceded control. OJ thinks that Sherif wanted someone to place limits on him. ‘You would have thought that after the 1953 study, when I threatened him with the block of wood, that there’d be problems.’ OJ laughed and shook his head. ‘But he seemed to want someone to take charge.’

Listening to OJ’s account of how hard they worked at Robbers Cave and how it took weeks for him to get back into the habit of sleeping more than four hours a night, I got a glimpse of Sherif’s drive and his ability to inspire those around him: ‘All of us went for broke, we were so committed.’ Sherif and OJ had a particular bond. ‘It was a heart-and-soul thing for both of us. We put everything into it,’ OJ said. I recalled how OJ had once told me that he and Sherif would have thrown themselves off a cliff if the study failed.

I was still surprised by how open OJ was in admitting that Sherif knew exactly what he wanted to prove at Robbers Cave and why it had been so important to have things worked out in advance. ‘We knew that that kind of thing happened, and we just reproduced it. Looking back, I don’t think we did find anything that was not known about groups and harmony and tension,’ OJ said. He saw it as his job to engineer the unfolding of Sherif’s theory in the landscape at Robbers Cave. This emphasis on confirmation rather than investigation had always intrigued me, right since I first began to research the experiment, and it wasn’t until I did some more reading that I understood this was a tradition from Kurt Lewin: to use experiments as a way of showing ‘the way things work in the real world’, where your research was a confirmation of what you already intuitively knew.

On one hand, it was a refreshing contrast to the often gimmicky kind of laboratory-based social psychological research of the era that valued counterintuitive and surprising results. On the other hand, acting out a theory at Robbers Cave State Park and looking for confirmation of truth allowed for a casual cruelty towards the subjects in the study.

This apparent dichotomy that many social psychologists of the period seemed to share, between altruism and deep concern for humankind and an apparent lack of concern for the psychological wellbeing of their subjects, made sense to me now. I didn’t agree with it, but I could see how Sherif and OJ could hold two such contradictory views at once. I understood now how Sherif was able to deny that there were any ethical problems with his research. After all, he saw social relationships as ‘messy, contradictory and fraught with conflict, suffering and agony’, and his responsibility as a kind of social engineer, intent on rectifying injustice and improving the world. The discomfort of a group of eleven-year-old boys was a small price to pay for research that could alleviate any of that torment. It explained why both Sherif and Carolyn saw social psychology as a vocation rather than just a career. And while they were forced to downplay this during the McCarthy years, their brand of idealism never left them.

OJ didn’t agree with Sherif’s conclusion that you could overcome conflict as easily as Sherif’s experiment appeared to demonstrate. But he never confided this in Sherif. ‘Afterwards, he wrote and told me it was the most important thing he ever did. It defined him. He said it was the biggest thing in his life. So I kept my opinions to myself.’

I could see what OJ meant. It might have been easy to manipulate a peaceful resolution at Robbers Cave with groups of children, but how could you bring about a similar result in the broader world, when the gap between the haves and the have-nots was as wide as it had ever been, and the discrimination was systemic? But if you raised these kinds of questions with Sherif, OJ said, he shut the discussion down. There was no surer way of bringing an end to Sherif’s evening seminars than by pointing out the degree of control the men had over the boys and asking how one could manipulate warring classes or nations into peace. And even if one could, OJ said, he didn’t believe those kinds of alliances lasted.

I thought of the optimism of the ruling elite in Turkey in the early years of the Republic, when the new Turkishness was supposed to be the glue that bound new citizens together, and how in contemporary times it has come unstuck with the rise of conservative Islamist politics and the autocratic dictatorship of Erdoğan. Would Sherif have predicted the swamping of the engineered secular and modern identity, and the values of the Old World rushing in to take its place?

OJ understood that Sherif had an investment in the outcome of the experiment that went beyond scientific reputation, and that he was in some grand way trying to right a wrong. But OJ knew very little about Sherif’s background in Turkey. And he never asked. ‘It was one of those things. I had the greatest respect for him, but I felt I needed to keep him at a distance.’

Sherif’s daughters had also told me how little information their father had volunteered about Turkey, how they had to coax it out of him. And I wondered about the burden of carrying traumatic experiences. Visiting Turkey, I became acutely aware of the silences that must have haunted people who lived through those early years of the Republic.

Turkish historian Leyla Neyzi has described how fear has inhibited many older Turkish people from passing on oral histories to the next generation, especially when their personal stories differ from the official version. In one interview with a ninety-four-year-old woman in Izmir, who had lived there since childhood, Neyzi noticed the silences in the woman’s narrative:

[i]t has no doubt to do with the widespread violence between Christians and Muslims and the bloodletting that occurred at the end of Turkey’s ‘War of Independence’ that made the Turks, first victims, then perpetrators, to want to forget their suffering, and subsequently their guilt, for what they made others suffer. It is, in a nutshell, the story of modern Turkey — and remains so. Unfortunately, today’s internecine violence between Turks and Kurds is a repeat performance in contemporary disguise.

Victim, perpetrator, enemy, friend. I could see how pain and guilt could drive a kind of collective amnesia, or an unofficial silence.

Yet Sertan Batur, a Turkish scholar and expert on Sherif I met in Vienna, doesn’t believe that the camp studies accurately reflected the conflicts of Sherif’s Turkish childhood. ‘It was very idealistic,’ Sertan said. ‘But it wasn’t realistic.’ He is dark-eyed and rather serious, and when we met, he greeted me by putting a hand over his heart. We were in the wood-panelled Café Hawelka, in Vienna’s Jewish quarter.

The Robbers Cave experimental design wasn’t much like the Turkey Sherif grew up in, Sertan went on. ‘He said he was affected by the conflicts between the Turks and the Greeks. But his research didn’t capture the inequalities in power relations between the Greeks and the Turks, or the history between them.’

After all, Sherif’s boys had been chosen for their homogeneity. They shared the same skin colour, ethnic background, language, culture, and religion. As such, Sherif’s theory of the resolution of group conflict was of little use in Turkey, then or now, Sertan said. ‘It doesn’t answer problems of conflict between people of different races, ethnicity, or culture, and he did not address the issue of power imbalances between groups.’ While Sertan, who works with migrant families in Vienna, admires Sherif, he said Sherif’s theory ‘doesn’t explain big social issues. He cannot explain society for me.’

‘I think he wanted to find something optimistic in the climate of the Cold War — I think he wanted to produce something politically useful so his research said something powerful and inspiring for the oppressed. He could say, “I have discovered something that will stop people hurting each other. If we focus on bigger issues, things that are important to all of us, we can overcome these problems between us.” The political implications were more important than the research techniques and methods. I think he ignored his results from the early experiment and censored his own research and emphasised the optimistic rather than the realistic results.’

Perhaps Sertan was right: the Robbers Cave experiment was a Cold War bedtime story to give people hope in a time of fear — or a narrative that Sherif told himself to increase his faith in humanity and feel that he was making a valuable contribution to the future of the world. But it felt deeper than that to me.

In 1954, with the successful completion of the Robbers Cave study, the tight-knit research team dissolved. Within months, Jack White had moved to the University of Utah, in Salt Lake City, and OJ Harvey was on his way to the University of Colorado, in Boulder, via Yale. Only Bob Hood was left, and his dissertation was almost finished.

With Harvey gone, Hood became the focus of Sherif’s affection. Sherif was possessive and proud of the achievements of his graduate students, but particularly OJ Harvey, who was part Choctaw; Jack White, who was Kiowa; and Bob Hood, who was Cherokee. Hood jokingly called Sherif’s habit of bragging to his Ivy League colleagues about what he could do with poor boys down south as his Pygmalion complex, even though Hood’s family owned a string of pharmacies in Oklahoma.

Sherif was reluctant to let Hood go. Whenever Hood tried to arrange his final oral examination, Sherif would put him off. The story goes that Sherif was so reluctant to see him leave that Hood, who had a reputation as an unconventional thinker, had to take extreme measures to gain his independence. He rang Sherif in his office one morning and said, ‘I’ll be on the bleachers at Owen Field at three this afternoon, and I want you to be there.’ When Sherif showed up, Hood pulled out a Colt .45 and put it down on the seat between them and said, ‘I want to finish my dissertation.’ Sherif nodded and said, ‘Okay, Bob,’ before getting up and walking away. Hood graduated soon after. I laughed when I heard this story — it seems almost certainly apocryphal — but it has a disturbing edge.

With Harvey already at Yale and White making preparations to leave, the men worked quickly to write a book about the experiment. Carolyn, at home with the children during the Robbers Cave camp, had prepared what she could of the manuscript ready for the others to add the missing pieces.

But OJ was never proud of it. ‘We wrote it in a hurry. And it shows,’ he told me. Six weeks after the experiment was over, a photocopied report, bound in a pale blue cardboard cover and titled Intergroup Conflict and Cooperation, was produced in the University of Oklahoma’s print room. Sherif immediately sent one hundred copies out to colleagues in psychology and sociology departments across the country, and signed a contract with Doubleday to publish it as a book entitled Friendship and Friction Between Groups.

Yet after Sherif sent the manuscript to Doubleday editor Josephine Lees, she wrote to him in February 1955, ‘We feel that the manuscript you have presented to us is, frankly, not ready for publication in its present form.’ It was clear that the chapters had been written by different authors, and at different times. ‘As a result, the work does not hang together,’ she noted. She rejected the photos as not being of suitable reproduction quality and pointed out that if they were to publish any photos of the boys, Sherif would have to ‘obtain written permission from the parents to do so’.

The letter was like a red rag to a bull. Sherif reacted by putting his foot down, refusing to make any changes. Doubleday cancelled the contract.

The University of Oklahoma had established an Institute of Group Relations, headed up by Sherif, in 1955, and he felt very much at home there. But by 1958, he still had not been offered tenure, despite being there almost ten years, and the university’s strict anti-nepotism rules made it difficult for Carolyn to find ongoing work. In 1958 and 1959, he took leave to go to Texas with Carolyn, where she completed her PhD. It was unusual at the time for a father to be the primary parent involved in childcare, but Sherif’s daughter Sue remembers it as a happy period, with Muzafer spending the summers taking his three daughters to swimming pools and the cinema, where they went to repeated showings of the Marilyn Monroe vehicle Some Like It Hot.

In 1960, the University of Oklahoma was considering offering Sherif the post of research professor, and the dean of the graduate college, Lloyd Swearingen, wrote to Gordon Allport: ‘In your opinion has he made truly outstanding research contributions in the field? Is he truly outstanding among the men of his field in the United States?’ If Allport could give them a ‘frank and sincere answer’, it would be held in the ‘strictest confidence’.

Allport replied at length:

He has constantly been an intense and productive scholar. Even as a student he was a tenacious eager-beaver, holding the highest standards over himself. His level of ‘drive’ has remained continuously high. From my point of view he deserves extra credit for tackling the really tough type of problem in social psychology, and not settling for easy and methodologically ‘safe’ topics.

Yes, I think he would be called ‘distinguished’ by the majority of social psychologists in this country. His researches and theoretical writing have aroused much attention and are constantly cited. Professionally he ‘gets around’ and at meetings one can see him arguing vigorously in some corner with colleagues from a variety of institutions.

If I have any hesitation, it concerns his personality. Sometimes he has seemed difficult to work with. He is somewhat intolerant of other points of view, and keeps his own pace rather than adapting to a team. But you know far better than I whether these traits that I noted in past years are any sense disqualifying. I realise that the honor you are considering is in recognition of scholarly productiveness and not of charm. I am personally rather critical of Sherif’s manners, but even I would endorse the choice, if you decide to make it.

Sherif was offered and accepted the position and remained at the University of Oklahoma until 1966, when he took leave of absence so he and Carolyn could take up one-year visiting professorships at Penn State. The temporary positions turned into permanent ones, and Sherif would never work in Oklahoma again.

No one knows exactly where or when Sherif’s illness started — whether it began in Turkey or if it was triggered in America — but there are hints of it along the way: his recklessness with money, his impulsiveness, his seeming imperviousness to danger, the bouts of furious energy alternating with troughs of depression. Sherif’s children have little memory of him being ill when they were small, remembering a warm and loving, funny father. But Carolyn saw the roller-coaster of his highs and lows, and it must have been frightening for them both. In the 1950s and 1960s, mental illness was stigmatising, and Sherif was reluctant to seek treatment. Carolyn did her best, but it was a struggle without professional help.

Sherif’s graduate students from this period remember he and Carolyn as unfailingly generous and interested in their work, always hospitable, hosting parties and get-togethers and treating them like family. Some engaged couples learned not to show surprise when Sherif gave them autographed copies of his books as wedding presents. He could be gregarious and charming, when he wasn’t morose or depressed. His students saw him as indomitable and eccentric. Colleagues, however, increasingly had their reservations about his effectiveness as an educator. Sherif’s former supervisor Gardner Murphy wrote to him in 1956 saying he had something to communicate that Sherif probably wouldn’t like to hear:

A considerable number of people have told me within the last few years that you have given public addresses which would be very effectual, if they were carefully planned and completed within the time allowance, and if you stuck to your text. They say you frequently leave your notes and become excited and ramble and that you frequently go on an hour or more beyond the time which has been strictly defined as closing hour.

Murphy’s letter reminded me of some of the critical comments some of Sherif’s colleagues had made about him around the time of the FBI investigation. Perhaps Murphy, who knew Sherif well, thought that his former student could make use of this feedback to improve his public speaking. Or did he sense that underneath this arrogance and passionate excitability there was perhaps evidence of irrationality and disorganised thinking? I wondered how Sherif, who held grudges for years against people he felt had slighted him — he carried a mildly critical review of one of his books around for twenty years and periodically urged one of his graduate students to write to the reviewer to ‘set the record straight’ — would have taken Murphy’s letter. There’s no reply in the archives and no evidence of whether it had any impact on Sherif’s behaviour. But their warm correspondence continued over the years, and Sherif seems not to have taken offence. Ten years after Murphy’s letter Sherif was renowned at the University of Oklahoma for evening seminars that went way beyond the allotted time. As for Carolyn, I wondered if she knew of the letter, and if she felt defensive on her husband’s behalf or secretly relieved that Murphy had put his finger on something that worried her too.

In 1966, after seventeen years at the University of Oklahoma, Sherif was offered a position at Penn State, along with Carolyn, and they left Oklahoma for good. But after their move, things began unravelling.

For someone whose identity was so tied up with his work, the move from Oklahoma was a wrench for Sherif. Penn State was not the University of Oklahoma; he was no longer a big fish in a small pond. Small-group research was becoming unfashionable in the wake of the Cold War, and funding was drying up. And while Carolyn settled in and soon developed a happy and successful professional life, Muzafer’s behaviour made it increasingly hard for him to make new friends or hold onto old ones. He became very jealous and aggressive if he thought a man was paying Carolyn too much attention, and one colleague described how at one conference Sherif physically attacked a man he thought was flirting with her. To Carolyn’s dismay, he entertained his students with stories of eating dog food when there was nothing to eat at home. Physically, he was in poor shape. Years of heavy smoking and drinking and untreated diabetes caught up with him. In November 1968, he had a car accident under the influence of alcohol, and soon after had a stroke. It was then that the doctors looking at his brain scan asked Carolyn about earlier head trauma, and she remembered the story Sherif had told of being kicked by a camel as a boy.

In November 1969, Carolyn made some notes on some loose sheets of paper as if gathering her thoughts. She described Sherif’s drinking and aggression towards her, his paranoia, and his seemingly unshakeable belief in his own ‘delusions’. Despite her insistence that ‘he must get well, then he would see things in perspective’, it made no difference. She wrote, ‘What does this add up to? I am too terrified to say. The symptoms add up to a megalomaniac … who sees everyone plotting against him.’

Three months later, Sherif received a letter from his lawyer brother in Turkey, who wrote to say he wanted to visit, clearly hoping to make amends. But Muzafer was still bitter and didn’t want to see him. Carolyn wrote down the details of a dream she had around this time — ‘I had a terrible dream. Terrible because I fear it is true.’ In the dream, she wrote a reply to Muzafer’s brother: ‘Don’t let your conscience as a brother trouble you. I have been living with a crazy man — a mad man — for 25 years. The madness has only become worse until it affects every aspect of life …’

Despite these personal pressures, Carolyn’s career was flourishing. Penn State had offered her a position as part of its efforts to employ more female faculty, and even though she felt like the ‘token woman’ in the psychology department, she began to gain recognition for the twenty years of research and co-authorship of more than five books with Sherif. But at the same time Sherif’s career languished. His bouts of depression got deeper and more frequent, and he was hospitalised several times. Stanley Milgram arranged for Sherif to join him at City University of New York, organising a visiting professorship, but at the last minute Sherif dropped out. When a former student wrote to Sherif from Turkey, asking if he was interested in a position at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Sherif never replied, although he kept the letter until the end of his life.

He had been cut adrift from Turkey. He had no passport, so no official proof that he had ever been a Turkish citizen. Sherif’s daughter Ann said he was often embarrassed to speak the language because it had changed so much that his Turkish sounded antiquated. I imagined how painful it must have been to be marked out a relic of the past, when he’d begun as a symbol of Turkey’s future. But he never stopped thinking about Turkey. He loved travelling, and on family trips in Northern New Mexico or Texas or Arizona, he often stopped at some scenic or wild spot to exclaim to his daughters, ‘Oh, babies, this reminds me of Turkey!’ As he aged, he became increasingly nostalgic for his country of origin, but remained paranoid about whether he would be safe in going back. He didn’t know what kind of welcome, if any, he would get. He was bitter that his older brother had had him legally disowned from the family, that his colleagues at the university in Ankara had not come to his aid when he was jailed. He was never able to shake off the suspicion and paranoia, and perhaps partly understandably: in Turkey he had been under surveillance and informed on, and in America he had been investigated by the FBI.

He worried especially that the Turkish government might still be out to punish him. One of his colleagues from Ankara University, folklorist Pertev Boratav, who had been jailed for undermining nationalism and ‘promoting leftism’ in his classes at Ankara University, had moved to France upon his release, in 1952. In 1974, the Turkish Ministry of Culture inaugurated an International Folklore Conference and accepted Boratav’s submission to present, but at the last minute his paper was removed from the program.

Sherif didn’t renounce his Turkish citizenship, but he didn’t take up US citizenship, either. This meant he couldn’t vote, but it also meant he couldn’t travel to international conferences because he had no passport. Although his daughter Sue said he quipped that he was a ‘citizen of the world’, without citizenship or a passport of any country, his status meant he remained an outsider.

I wondered at what point Sherif realised or admitted to himself that he would never go back to Turkey. Perhaps it was towards the end of his life, when his daughters were able to coax stories about his childhood from him. But for a long time he felt a bitter sense of betrayal for being unexpectedly exiled from his homeland. And talking about Turkey must have been a painful reminder of what he had lost.

The world was slow to catch on to what Muzafer Sherif already knew: he was a giant in social psychology. And until people acknowledged the fact, he chafed and complained about the slowness of his well-deserved recognition. But underneath this bluster and bravado, OJ Harvey told me, Sherif yearned for acceptance.

‘He always felt like an outsider.’ A horse whinnied from the paddock next door to OJ’s house and OJ cocked his ear, listening for a moment, before continuing. ‘When he came over here to America in 1945, he got a ride on a military plane. He still told the story of that plane ride decades later, in vivid detail, like it had just happened.’ OJ shook his head. ‘Some of the guys on the plane were military brass and they asked him, “What do you do?” And Muzafer told them, “I’m a social psychologist.” And they couldn’t believe it — a Turk being a psychologist!’ OJ’s voice went up and he waved his arms, imitating Sherif’s outrage. Sherif never got over it, OJ said. A decade later, Sherif was still bitter, recounting the story of their incredulity and prejudice and his humiliation. He had this craving, OJ said. Sherif felt that nobody understood him, or took his work seriously enough. He wanted recognition of his genius.

‘He was terribly bright. But despite being so bright and well educated, he never felt equal. Isn’t that amazing?’ OJ said this with a kind of wonder. ‘He viewed himself as top of the heap — oh, no question. But he felt he never got the accolades he deserved. He was his own worst enemy that way. He thought it was prejudice that meant he didn’t get recognition he deserved. I mentioned to him a couple of times — you know, if he hadn’t been so insistent then maybe people would have been more generous in their recognition of his ability? But that didn’t change him.’ OJ laughed. ‘Maybe it was true that people begrudged him awards. He could be very competitive, he could be very difficult, and so people had very mixed feelings about him.’

In the late 1960s, Sherif was presented with both the prestigious Kurt Lewin Memorial Award and the APA Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award. But he seemed incapable of enjoying the honours and made his displeasure known. Two of his former graduate students wrote that he complained the award citation was sloppily written and incorrect, he should have gotten the award sooner, and he wondered why so many social psychologists he regarded as inferior had been awarded it before him.

By now Sherif’s intellectual influence was waning. In 1948, he and Carolyn had published An Outline of Social Psychology, a well-received textbook. But a subsequent revision in 1956 was less successful, and the final revision in 1969 was even less so, seemingly outdated as it reflected their own particular view of social psychology rather than the rest of the ever-expanding field. Bob Hood used their textbook when he moved from the University of Oklahoma and taught at a women’s college in Pittsburgh. One of his students that I spoke to told me, ‘I went to graduate school in social psychology having no idea that there were any other social psychologists in the world other than the Sherifs. But at graduate school I discovered all these new theories and ways of looking at the world. And I called Bob and I was furious.’ Several of Sherif’s former graduate students agree that the Sherifs’ book looked ‘selective and unrepresentative’, but suggest that before the 1960s this was typical of social scientists, who used their texts to promote their own theories and cite their own research.

By 1967, there were only three rather tatty-looking copies of The Robbers Cave Experiment left for sale in the University of Oklahoma’s bookstore, where it had sold 5,000 copies over the previous thirteen years. But when Bob Hood approached them about reprinting it, they refused on the grounds that Sherif had left the university — and also, Hood suspected, processing orders and distribution was a ‘headache’. The bookshop declared it out of print. The Sherifs had kept the story of the experiment alive in their books and articles published during this period.

Between 1970 and 1977, Carolyn, perhaps in an attempt to lift Muzafer’s flagging spirits as much as to maintain the profile of their research, tried to get the book published. They sent out a proposal to more than twenty publishers, pointing out they received a steady stream of requests for copies of the now out-of-print monolith and that ‘most introductory books in psychology, sociology and social psychology include the experiment’. But they had no success, even though by then the Robbers Cave study was regarded as something of a classic.

In 1977, the CIA released thousands of documents, after a freedom of information lawsuit, about its funding of research into mind control and interrogation techniques that could be used against enemies. Carolyn was horrified to find that Muzafer had unwittingly accepted funding from the CIA for small-group research he conducted while she had been completing her PhD a decade earlier. Sherif had conducted a covert observational study on groups of adolescent gangs. It was part of a program of top-secret experiments called MKUltra. But while Sherif was studying urban gang members, the CIA applied the same research to techniques for renegade members of the KGB: ‘Now, getting a juvenile delinquent defector was motivationally not all that much different from getting a Soviet one.’

The Sherifs weren’t the only social scientists duped by the CIA, but the news must have been distressing, given their idealism and political views. At a professional forum and in the pages of the APA Monitor, Carolyn reiterated that she and Muzafer ‘did not share the Cold War consensus’ and had no idea that the funds had come from the CIA.

It was likely they shared the same sense of incredulity and outrage expressed by sociologist Jay Schulman, who wrote:

… it had to do with my own naivete. Even though my politics were socialist, I had no understanding at that time of how the real world operated … In 1957, I was myself a quasi-Marxist and if I had known that the study was sponsored by the CIA, there is really, obviously, no way that I would have been associated with that study or that work … My view is that social scientists have a deep personal responsibility for questioning the sources of funding, and the fact that I didn’t do it at the time was simply, in my judgment, indication of my own naivete and political innocence in spite of my ideological bent.

However, Carolyn’s career continued to blossom. At Penn State she was quickly promoted from temporary faculty to tenure track and from associate to professor within four years. She wrote in an autobiographical essay that, after years of teaching and research and writing with Muzafer, first at Princeton, then at Oklahoma, finally ‘academia made room for me’. She had had what one friend called ‘an epiphany’ about her own experiences as a woman psychologist, and gender discrimination became her intellectual passion:

To me, the atmosphere created by the women’s movement was like breathing fresh air after years of gasping for breath. If anyone believes that I credit it too much for changes in my own life, I have only this reply: I know I did not become a significantly better social psychologist between 1969–1972, but I surely was treated as a better social psychologist.

But even before he retired in 1972, Muzafer was often depressed, and friends recall how Carolyn tried to keep him engaged, inviting students over for meals and parties. Most times, Sherif stayed in his room instead of coming out to join them. He had by now been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and he was in hospital again in 1982 when Carolyn was admitted with a sudden illness. And he was still in hospital when she died of cancer, aged sixty, just a few months later.

Carolyn had been his lover and wife, his co-author and intellectual partner, his voice of reason, his port in the storm, his carer. He was devoted to her. During one of the group experiments, he wrote to tell her how he felt after she had called him one night: ‘In the midst of all this, your voice … adds so much beauty to … the terribly complex circumstances of my life and … keeps me standing on my feet.’

Carolyn had shared his idealism, his belief that social psychology was a calling, his great faith that they could do something important for humanity, and a steadfast belief in his brilliance. They talked social psychology and ideas at the dinner table, at the beach, on family camping holidays. In her own way, Carolyn was as driven as he had been.

Without her, he was devastated. He was in and out of hospital over the next three years, and attempted suicide at least once during this time. It seemed impossible that he would recover.

Just before his eightieth birthday in 1986, Sherif and three of his graduate students from Penn State took a road trip to Robbers Cave. He was on a lithium regime by then and, according to his family, a changed person. The new Muzafer was mild-mannered and moderate, rather than extravagant and opinionated. Sherif talked social psychology most of the way, but at the park, he was quiet for a while. Then he took the students on a guided tour, pointing out the cabin where after the experiment he and Carolyn used to come and stay on vacation with their daughters, before moving deeper into the park to find the mess hall, the baseball pitch, and, of course, the cave.

At the park’s entrance, by the pile of logs carved with white letters spelling out ‘Robbers Cave State Park’, Sherif sat and posed for a photo. He had a copy made and later sent it to OJ with a note saying how great it was to revisit the place after all those years — the note where he thanked him again for making the experiment happen.

It took me a moment to recognise the old man in the photo when OJ showed it to me. His cheeks were hollow; his grey hair was long and straggly. But his ravaged face looked peaceful.

A year later, in 1987, OJ began making arrangements for the book they had written about Robbers Cave to be published. Perhaps because Sherif had so recently written enclosing his photo at the state park, or maybe simply because OJ knew how pleased it would make him, he wrote to Sherif to let him know. Sherif’s response was jubilant:

Dear O.J. — old friend!

Warm thanks for your letter of April 13. I do appreciate the close feelings conveyed in it. It is high time that at last a university press decided to publish the Robbers Cave … I am also very happy that the introduction is to be written by Don Campbell and not by any lesser person in theory and methodology … With heartfelt appreciation for all your activities in Norman and since then … Sincerely, Muzafer.

I don’t know if Sherif saw the book before he died the following year — whether he held the slim volume in his hands and turned it over to see the impressionistic drawing of the boys engaged in tug of war on the front cover. It hardly mattered. It would have been enough for him to know that finally, over thirty years since the research at Robbers Cave, their work stood alone. I could imagine the frisson of pleasure he would have felt reading the words of Don Campbell, a psychologist he so admired, emblazoned on the book’s cover: ‘There have been no subsequent studies of anywhere near the magnitude of the Robbers Cave experiment …’

The next time I went to Robbers Cave, I climbed the track up to the top and sat on the sandstone rock to look out across the valley. It was mid-morning and the colours were still deep. I closed my eyes. Up here on top of the high ledge, with a breeze ruffling the trees and my thoughts full of outlaws, I could be on Mount Bozdağ, with its own robbers caves, its stories of bandits hiding in the hills. I thought of the moment in the experiment where Sherif knew the thrill of success — when the formerly pious and timid Eagles threw themselves in fury at the enemy group, the Rattlers. What prompted it was not competition, as Sherif argued, but the theft of the boys’ knives. It was an act of banditry.

I remembered the story of the new mother on Mount Bozdağ the year that Sherif was born, and her terror hearing that her baby would be stolen from her by the brigand Charkirge and his outlaw gang. And how, down in the main street of Bozdağ today, a statue of a bandit Poslu Mestan Efe now stands, he and those like him now immortalised as heroes for the guerilla war they conducted against the invading Greek army. Muzafer Sherif’s childhood was marked by these violent reversals. In the absence of a Turkish army, the lawbreakers and bandits in Ottoman times became heroes of the new Republic, resistance warriors who marched with Atatürk at the head of parades, receiving military rank and pensions for their services. I couldn’t help thinking that perhaps Sherif hoped for his own kind of reversal, where instead of being shunned and marginalised in his homeland, he could be welcomed and feted on his return.

I had found some notes Sherif had made for a talk at Princeton around 1945, soon after he arrived back in America:

Perhaps I am the first Turk you ever saw in your lives. But you have undoubtedly heard about the Turks … you surely must have listened to the stories about us — ‘the Terrible Turk’ — with a dagger in his hand killing people whenever he can, starving the poor Armenians etc. etc. … That is not the Turk I know.

In a series of bullet points, Sherif jotted down evidence of the modernisation of Turkey — education, dress, transport, and literacy, his attempts to counter his audience’s prejudice with facts, as a way of changing their minds. The Turk he knew was civilised, educated, forward-thinking, and passionately patriotic about his country.

I had gone back and forth in my thoughts on Sherif’s motivations during my research, discarding one hypothesis then another. Sherif’s camp studies, including the final and successful Robbers Cave experiment, were a mirror of his past; a celebration of his ideals; a tribute to the power of collectivism; a testament to Marxism; a triumph of social engineering. Perhaps it was all these things, a historical canvas onto which I could project any number of hypotheses or explanations.

But knowing what I knew now about Sherif’s persecution and exile, the experiment’s exploration of themes of friendship and betrayal, identity and belonging, and the call to let go of rivalries and bring enemies into the fold, made it seem like a love letter to the young Republic, the early years of the new Turkey.

Perhaps it was in the Ottoman period, on Mount Bozdağ, that Sherif experienced his earliest and most powerful notion of reconciliation. A week after the picnic the young mother had held in his honour, the bandit Charkirge returned the invitation. On the plateau, almost at the top of the mount, the Levantine families arrived to find a lavish spread, with roasting lamb, pilaf, yoghurt, and sweet kadayif. Afterwards, all the guests gathered wild blackberries together for the families to take home and make jam, and instead of her earlier anxiety, the young mother felt ‘comfortable’ with the bandits and their families. The crisis was averted; the baby boy was safe. Her fear evaporated. ‘Now we were friends,’ she wrote.

Down on the path I heard a boy laugh. Someone called out ‘Echo echo echo,’ and the call travelled out from the ledge and back again, boys’ voices bouncing and calling from the present and the past.

What was the Robbers Cave experiment about? What were they trying to prove? All of the boys I have met and interviewed have asked me the same question. And I have struggled with an answer. It was about groups and fighting, and then groups making peace, I said, but it sounded weak. Is there any answer I can give that doesn’t sound like a truism? And they sense it’s not as simple as that, either — some wonder if they have been part of someone else’s ethical drama. The experiment might have been a metaphor for nations or countries or ideologies in conflict, but since I met some of the boys and they realised that they were unknowing participants in an experiment, they have begun a struggle to understand its moral implications and what effect it has had in their lives. Some, like Doug, have made a kind of peace with it and moved on. For others, that journey is just beginning. The now-adult boys I’ve spoken to are still affected in their own ways by being in Sherif’s experiment. As I was drafting this chapter, one of them emailed me, wanting to know when the book was coming out. ‘Can’t wait to share with family and friends so they will understand why I am a bit odd,’ he wrote, adding a smiley-face emoji to show he was joking. Or was he?

Reckless and cautious, egalitarian and elitist, last generation of an empire and first of the new Republic, adored husband, often infuriating colleague, loving father, driven man. I have hoped to shape a figure from the slippery clay of anecdotes and actions, from gossip and snatches of history from a forgotten era. Running through it all, a thrumming thread of energy, was Sherif’s unshakeable belief in a theory of power of tribal loyalty, in-groups and out-groups, that reflected his own experience as an outsider looking for a place to belong.

I had read Orhan Pamuk’s memoir Istanbul in preparation for my trip to Turkey. In it, he evoked the Istanbul of his childhood, haunted by ‘hazun’: a deep sense of loss and melancholy; the hollow left by a disappearing world, and an intense nostalgia for the glory days of the Empire. Istanbul, once the centre of the Ottoman Empire, had been abandoned as the capital, after the seat of power moved to Ankara.

In Istanbul, I had walked around in circles, up and down hills in the city’s Beyoğlu district, looking for Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence, a building that Pamuk planned along with the novel of the same name.

When I finally found it, I wondered how on earth I’d missed it. A tall traditional wooden house with an overhanging bay window, it’s painted a bright modern red and sits dramatically on the corner of a steep street. Pamuk bought the building in the 1990s, when the area was rundown and the building was dilapidated. Now the neighbourhood has sprouted fashionable coffee houses and galleries. But his novel was finished and published well before the renovation of the building was complete, and the museum did not finally open until 2012.

Inside the Museum of Innocence, Pamuk has gathered together everyday objects and organised them to tell the story of the characters of his novel. A salt shaker, playing cards, lottery tickets, soap, a cinch-waisted 1950s dress covered with roses, movie posters, identity papers, newspaper clippings displayed in glass cases — all document the story of a failed romance and provide a vivid picture of life in post-1950s Istanbul. I smiled to myself, realising that in coming to Turkey I had naïvely hoped to find something similar to tell me as much about the everyday life, the emotions, and the experiences of a young Muzafer Sherif. As if such a thing could have existed.

In the lobby, what at first seemed to be a wall of cuneiform script turned out, when I stepped closer, to be an entire wall covered with over 4,000 cigarette butts, some smudged with lipstick, all skewered with pins and annotated with the date and place each was smoked by the narrator’s beloved.

I spent the afternoon in the museum, wondering at its obsessiveness and its charm and its moving depiction of the lives of the characters. Pamuk had created an entire world, right down to the loft bedroom where Kemal, the narrator, told his story. It was a self-contained world, referring to the particulars of a specific time and place. I wondered at its almost complete absence of any reference to Turkish politics.

Perhaps it was that I was still looking for connections, but in a strange way, the narrow focus, the obsession with detail, the careful avoidance of any direct political commentary reminded me of Sherif’s work at Robbers Cave, as if the experiment was a novel, the earlier experiments drafts of the later, completed opus. Perhaps Sherif’s experiment wasn’t just a metaphor about Cold War politics or the idealism of the Kemalist years. It was more personal than that; it was more like the kind of story that people tell themselves to make sense of wars and violence, a narrative with heroes and villains. Throughout his life, Sherif was emotionally conflicted, struggling with competing and sometimes violent feelings of love and hate, trust and suspicion, sanity and madness. At Robbers Cave, he had created a perfect moment, or recaptured an old one: a world where wounds were healed and what was lost was restored, a place where all was whole and complete, while in the world outside, things were falling apart.

When the young woman called to me from the bottom of the stairs that the museum would be closing in fifteen minutes, I didn’t want to leave, to go outside again. It felt safe here, surrounded by these objects, caught in the embrace of this unfolding story.