Journey to Robbers Cave - Behavioral Scientist

On the heels of WWII, a team of psychologists set out to solve global conflict. Their lab? Boys summer camps. Their goal? Set the 11- and 12-year-old boys against one another to discover what, if anything, could restore peace. The result? One of psychology’s most enduring and controversial experiments, known collectively as the Robbers Cave studies.

Jennifer L. Bazar, assistant director at the National Museum of Psychology, tells the story of the studies and the researcher who led them, through its physical artifacts now housed at the museum—the letters, photographs, posters, camp flags, and field notes. Bazar explores the bold vision of Robbers Cave, along with its methods, results, and ethics, and asks, What lessons from the studies endure as conflicts continue to flare around the globe.

“Journey to Robbers Cave” originally appeared in Behavioral Scientist’s award-winning second print edition, Brain Meets World. — Evan Nesterak, Editor-in-Chief

Part 1: Visions

The year was 1948. Only three years had passed since the Axis powers signed the instrument of surrender effectively ending the Second World War. Fifty nations had taken part in the conflict that saw genocide and the first use of nuclear weapons. An estimated 50 million lives were lost and another 19–28 million died in the aftermath from disease and famine.

Borders had been redrawn across Europe. The Nuremberg trials had concluded on the international stage but were still underway in U.S. military courts. The United Nations was still in its infancy. Expansions to the Geneva Convention to protect civilians during war were still a year away. The Cold War loomed on the horizon.

It was in this year that social psychologist Muzafer Sherif began sketching out his vision for an experiment that he hoped would get at the heart of intergroup conflict and demonstrate the means to resolve it. In a letter to his former Ph.D. advisor, Gardner Murphy, he laid out his idea: two groups of boys set in competition with one another while attending a summer camp. Using standard camp activities, Sherif would manufacture conflict between the groups and then set about uncovering the best means of restoring peace. The project would prove to be a landmark in psychology that continues to influence the field some 70 years later.

After two major world wars in the first half of the twentieth century, psychologists began asking themselves what they could offer to help stave off a third global encounter. After receiving an influx of European scientists who had experienced fascism firsthand, the field of social psychology in the United States in particular was primed to lead this new focus of research.

Muzafer Sherif was a Turkish émigré who found himself searching for a home in the immediate postwar years. He held master’s degrees from Istanbul University and Harvard University, and earned his Ph.D. in social psychology from Columbia University in 1935. After returning to Turkey following his doctoral studies, Sherif began to speak out against a growing fascist regime, lending his support to the Communist Party of Turkey. His support of communism led to his arrest, albeit briefly; he escaped longer imprisonment thanks only to his brother’s political connections and by agreeing to leave Turkey. This arrangement meant that in 1945, Sherif returned to the United States. After breaking Turkey’s law forbidding civil servants (including professors) from marrying a foreigner, by wedding an American woman, fellow psychologist Carolyn Wood Sherif, any thought of one day returning to his home country was permanently rescinded.

And so as the world grappled with the aftermath of global conflict, Muzafer Sherif searched for a new home in a country where he did not hold citizenship and where his political views would eventually draw the attention of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Although initially successful in finding a fellowship at Princeton University, Muzafer spent the better part of two years searching for opportunities for himself and for Carolyn, a search made all the more urgent by the arrival of the first of their three daughters. During the process, he was told that universities weren’t in the process of giving aid to foreign researchers. Eventually, with the help of colleagues, Sherif managed to secure a Rockefeller Research Fellowship at Yale University.

It was this fellowship that allowed him to pursue his vision of an experiment that he hoped could act as a microcosm for global relations. Working collaboratively with Carolyn, he led his colleagues (including Marvin B. Sussman, Robert Huntington, O. J. Harvey, B. Jack White, and William R. Hood) through a series of three camp studies between 1949 and 1954.

These camps saw 11- and 12-year-old boys establish tight-knit groups with self-appointed team names like the “Red Devils,” “Pythons,” and “Rattlers” enter into rivalries that descended into name calling, the...