It was a real-life Lord of the Flies- 22 children left largely unsupervised and split
into two groups. Within days prejudice, mistrust, and slander had already sprung
up between the two factions of children, and it all almost ended in unimaginable tragedy.
In the summer of 1954 social psychologist Muzafer Sherif
transported a group of 22 boys to Robbers Cave State Park in Oklahoma. This greatly
unethical experiment would go on to inspire the infamous book Lord of the Flies just a year later,
with repercussions for the subjects that would last their whole lives.
Sherif was originally born in the Ottoman Empire prior to its collapse after World War I.
His academic brilliance earned him a chance to study psychology at the world-famous Harvard,
and he would go on to become one of the greatest psychologists of his generation.
However one experiment conducted on American school children tainted that reputation forever.
Having lived through the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the rise and fall of Nazi Germany- even
spending some time in Berlin prior to the start of the Second World War- Sherif was fascinated by
human psychology, and specifically why we carry out the behaviors that we do. However, Sherif
was quickly growing frustrated at the limitations of using animals to test out behavioral theories.
One of these theories, currently just a seed in his mind during the early 1950s, was the
realistic conflict theory. Sherif wanted to find out why groups behaved the way they did, and how
prejudices, stereotypes, and outright hatred grew out of competition between groups for resources.
Rats weren't intelligent enough to provide the answers Sherif needed, so he turned to children.
In the summer of 1954, Sherif trucked 22 children to Robbers Cave national park in Oklahoma. His
plan was to split them into two groups and see how competition bred inter-group conflicts.
The children were all 11 year old boys who had a Protestant,
two-parent background. They were all average or above average academic performers,
and did not know each other. They were all also carefully selected
so that when split up into two groups, each group would have a balance of common physical,
mental, and social talents to try and make the opposing sides as evenly matched as possible.
Each of the two groups of 11 children were picked up by a separate bus so they would
have no contact with each other, and were kept unaware of the other group's existence
during the first phase of the experiment. As the children arrived to the sectioned
off area of the park assigned to Sherif for the experiment, he set out to test two hypothesis:
The first was that when individuals who don't know each other are brought together to achieve common
group goals, a group structure and hierarchy with clearly assigned roles will form. The second, much
darker hypothesis was that once the two groups were brought into competition with each other,
hostile attitudes would arise in each group versus the opposing group,
and be adopted by the group as a whole.
However, Sherif also hoped to prove that two opposing groups would drop all prejudices to
come together in the face of a shared disaster. In fact, he had already tried this experiment a year
earlier, but met with failure- even after Sherif stole each group's clothing, smashed their toys
and tents, and framed the opposing group for it. That experiment was such a disaster that it
ended with Sherif drunkenly threatening to punch one of his research assistants,
while another assistant threatened Sherif with a block of wood if he threw that punch. The children
had not just refused to turn on each other, but had actually bonded against their common enemy,
and figured out that Sherif and his staff were trying to pit them against each other.
This time things would be different.
For the first two days of the experiment the goal was to keep the groups unaware of
each other's presence and allow the boys time to bond. This was done by presenting
the children with challenges that required cooperation and group discussion to complete,
as well as group activities such as hiking, swimming, and other recreational pursuits. In
the previous experiment, the boys had been allowed to meet and mix together before being separated,
and Sherif believed that this was to blame for the solidarity they showed
even as he tried to instigate inter-group hostilities. The groups ended up choosing
their own names- the Rattlers and the Eagles, and designed their own flags.
On day three, the groups were finally brought together.
Sherif had engineered a series of challenges that would pit one group versus the other.
This included tug-of-war, baseball, and other competitive events. To encourage
competition and up the stakes, Sherif gave away prizes and even trophies after each challenge.
The competitions continued for a series of days, with lavish praise and prizes awarded to
the winning team and no consolation prizes to the losers. The competitive nature of the activities
only served to heighten the sense of frustration for the losing side, which in turn quickly turned
into resentment for the winners- and this was exactly what Sherif had been planning on.
When the groups were told of an upcoming series of challenges, the Rattlers responded by proclaiming
their absolute confidence in their ability to win. They even took over the baseball field,
forbidding any Eagles from using it so that they could practice and improve their odds of winning.
After much talk about coming up with a way to make it clear the Eagles weren't allowed to use
the field, the Rattlers ended up hosting their flag on the field itself and warned the Eagles
not to touch it. Verbal warnings escalated into threats, much to Sherif's delight.
But Sherif had not just set up a series of competitions, he was actively working to
ensure that the two groups would foster true frustration and enmity towards the other.
To that end he engineered situations where one group would profit at the expense of the other,
such as delaying the arrival of one group for lunch so that when they got there,
the other group had eaten the best parts. This slow, insidious poisoning of attitudes between
the two groups went even better than Sherif could have hoped for,
and soon the two sides were calling each other names and levying taunts. The Eagles, looking to
vent their frustrations, went to the baseball field and took down the Rattlers flag, then
egged on by one of the research assistants who provided the matches, the Eagles burned the flag.
For the Rattlers, this was a bridge too far, and they immediately retaliated by invading
the other group's cabins while they were out for the day. The Rattlers trashed the cabins,
overturning beds and throwing the contents of each camper's luggage out all over the floor.
They even resorted to theft, stealing some of the Eagle's personal belongings. Once the
Eagles discovered the sabotage and theft, they sought out the Rattlers and fist fights ensued,
which the research staff had to quickly move to stop.
It's important at this point to note that the boys or even their parents had no idea they were part
of an experiment. As far as everyone knew, Sherif and the other research assistants were nothing
more than ordinary camp counselors. Even when they directly intervened to feed the growing hostility
between the two sides- such as by providing the Eagles with matches to burn the Rattler's flag-
the boys still had no idea they were being manipulated. Unlike the year before when the
campers slowly realized the research staff was trying to pit them against each other, this time
nobody on the Eagles or the Rattlers suspected a thing. Sherif's strategy of not allowing them
previous contact until they met on the field of battle- or competition at least- had worked
like a charm. With no opportunity to find common ground, and individual group dynamics already in
place after two days of bonding, each group was thoroughly and completely hostile to the other.
Sherif enforced a two day cooling off period after the physical confrontations over the
burned flag and the trashed cabins. During that time he had each group come up with lists that
characterized their and the opposing group. Perhaps unsurprisingly, each boy characterized
their own group in very favorable terms, while using highly unfavorable terms to characterize
the opposing group. Even with no history of prior delinquency or bad social behavior-
in fact the children had been explicitly selected because they didn't show either
of these two qualities- each group had managed to develop a strong prejudice against the other,
going so far as to directly question the moral character of members from the opposing group.
Now Sherif needed to prove that the groups could overcome their differences and work
together to achieve a common goal which threatened all. But first,
he had to reconcile the groups- or at least try to. To this end, Sherif brought the boys
together in activities he hoped would bond them, doing away with team competitive sports
and activities and instead doing things like shooting off fireworks on the 4th of July,
watching a movie together, and engaging in a bean-collecting contest. However, even after
several days of this, neither side was showing any true reconciliatory attitudes towards the other.
But Sherif still had hope in his theory, he just needed to put the children in a situation where
no one group acting alone could overcome the challenge presented. However this challenge
needed to have real consequences- at least in the minds of the children-
and couldn't be a simple game or recreational activity. The children
needed to be presented with a situation that threatened their very survival.
Sherif moved the children out of their old campsite and to a brand new one, hoping that
the new environment would lessen the memory of previous hostilities. At the new site, the
children's drinking water came from a reservoir atop a hill not far from the camp, and one day the
staff blocked off the flow of water. They blamed the loss of water on “vandals”, and the children,
still segregating themselves by groups, set out to find the source of the stoppage.
Arriving at the reservoir they found that the faucet had been blocked, and the children
dropped their differences and worked to resolve the problem together. After almost an hour,
the blockage was cleared, and the Rattlers even allowed the Eagles, who didn't have their canteens
with them, to go ahead of them and drink water first. All seemed well, but later that evening
the groups inevitably split back up into their two opposing camps and launched a food fight.
Encouraged by the cooperation, Sherif then set up a scenario where the boys needed to work together
to procure a film that they wanted to watch. Getting a copy of Treasure Island, the
research staff informed the children that the camp couldn't afford to pay for the film on their own,
and that if they children could raise $3.50 from each group, they would cover the rest.
Eventually the total sum was raised, even though the total contributions from each member and
each group was unequal- the children had come together over their shared goal of securing a
movie they very badly wanted to watch. That night at dinner there was no food fight,
and other than a few small provocations, the children got along relatively peacefully.
Sherif threw subsequent challenges at the children to prove that in the face of a
common threat or goal, the groups would come together. On the last day of camp,
at both breakfast and lunch the groups had largely disintegrated and children sat together
no matter their previous affiliation- something unthinkable just three days before.
In the end Sherif had proven his theory- or had he? His research was almost immediately
criticized as not just highly unethical, but also extremely biased. First, the children
had been left largely unsupervised during the whole affair so that they could develop their
independent group dynamics. Even when at one point the Eagles loaded up socks with rocks
with which to beat back the Rattlers should they find them raiding their cabins,
the staff did nothing- only stepping in once violence actually began.
But Sherif's research methods were extremely flawed- as has been noted,
he didn't set out to test his theory, but to prove it. He purposefully engineered the entire
experiment to get his desired result, even taking time to make sure that the children had time to
reconcile before testing if they truly would work together on a life-threatening superordinate goal
of restoring drinking water. His interference in providing a lighter to the Eagles so they could
burn down the Rattler's flag, and sabotaging the group's lunch times so that one group
would get little food because the other had eaten it all was also not just unethical,
but highly unscientific. Lastly, the boys all shared a common background,
they were white and came from Protestant, two parent homes. This alone was an elementary
mistake and flawed methodology that should've been obvious from the onset.
In the end, while there may be some truth to the fact that groups
may drop past differences to work for a common good, or combat a common threat,
real human society is far too nuanced to be mirrored by this simplistic experiment.
Given the extreme ethical issues in creating a realistic testing of Sherif's theories though,
it's likely we'll have to leave the question to historians and philosophers.
Now go check out Human sleep experiment that went horribly wrong, or click this other video instead.