“A Real-Life Lord of the Flies: the Troubling Legacy of the Robbers Cave Experiment; In the Early 1950s, the Psychologist Muzafer Sherif Brought Together a Group of Boys at a US Summer Camp—And Tried to Make Them Fight Each Other. Does His Work Teach Us Anything about Our Age of Resurgent Tribalism? [An Extract from The Lost Boys]”, 2018-04-16 (; backlinks):
In 50s Middle Grove, things didn’t go according to plan either, though the surprise was of a different nature. Despite his pretence of leaving the 11-year-olds to their own devices, Sherif and his research staff, posing as camp counsellors and caretakers, interfered to engineer the result they wanted. He believed he could make the two groups, called the Pythons and the Panthers, sworn enemies via a series of well-timed “frustration exercises”. These included his assistants stealing items of clothing from the boys’ tents and cutting the rope that held up the Panthers’ homemade flag, in the hope they would blame the Pythons. One of the researchers crushed the Panthers’ tent, flung their suitcases into the bushes and broke a boy’s beloved ukulele. To Sherif’s dismay, however, the children just couldn’t be persuaded to hate each other…The robustness of the boy’s “civilised” values came as a blow to Sherif, making him angry enough to want to punch one of his young academic helpers. It turned out that the strong bonds forged at the beginning of the camp weren’t easily broken. Thankfully, he never did start the forest fire—he aborted the experiment when he realised it wasn’t going to support his hypothesis.
But the Rockefeller Foundation had given Sherif $333,399.65$38,0001953. In his mind, perhaps, if he came back empty-handed, he would face not just their anger but the ruin of his reputation. So, within a year, he had recruited boys for a second camp, this time in Robbers Cave state park in Oklahoma. He was determined not to repeat the mistakes of Middle Grove.
…At Robbers Cave, things went more to plan. After a tug-of-war in which they were defeated, the Eagles burned the Rattler’s flag. Then all hell broke loose, with raids on cabins, vandalism and food fights. Each moment of confrontation, however, was subtly manipulated by the research team. They egged the boys on, providing them with the means to provoke one another—who else, asks Perry in her book, could have supplied the matches for the flag-burning?
…Sherif was elated. And, with the publication of his findings that same year, his status as world-class scholar was confirmed. The “Robbers Cave experiment” is considered seminal by social psychologists, still one of the best-known examples of “realistic conflict theory”. It is often cited in modern research. But was it scientifically rigorous? And why were the results of the Middle Grove experiment—where the researchers couldn’t get the boys to fight—suppressed? “Sherif was clearly driven by a kind of a passion”, Perry says. “That shaped his view and it also shaped the methods he used. He really did come from that tradition in the 30s of using experiments as demonstrations—as a confirmation, not to try to find something new.” In other words, think of the theory first and then find a way to get the results that match it. If the results say something else? Bury them…“I think people are aware now that there are real ethical problems with Sherif’s research”, she tells me, “but probably much less aware of the backstage [manipulation] that I’ve found. And that’s understandable because the way a scientist writes about their research is accepted at face value.” The published report of Robbers Cave uses studiedly neutral language. “It’s not until you are able to compare the published version with the archival material that you can see how that story is shaped and edited and made more respectable in the process.” That polishing up still happens today, she explains. “I wouldn’t describe him as a charlatan…every journal article, every textbook is written to convince, persuade and to provide evidence for a point of view. So I don’t think Sherif is unusual in that way.”