The Lost Boys

by Gina Perry

  Sherif’s mentor at Yale was Carl Hovland. One of Hovland’s research interests, gleaned from his war-time study of soldiers reluctant to fight, was the power of small groups in changing attitudes and behaviour. When it came to propaganda, Hovland found that fellow soldiers in the same troop were far more effective than military films at convincing unwilling soldiers to enter battle. Sherif’s idea for an experiment on the power of groups to shape the attitudes and prejudices of its members seemed, on the face of it, to continue in a similar vein.

  Knowing Sherif’s interest in group influence, in March 1948 Ronald Lippitt, a former student of Kurt Lewin who had visited Yale to give a guest colloquium that year, invited him to collaborate in his research on children at summer camp, but Sherif turned him down. Observing children in a single group, as Lippitt had planned, was of no interest to him. But Lippitt’s study gave Sherif an idea. What better way to study the interactions between groups of boys than by running his own summer camp?

  In September 1948, Sherif approached the American Jewish Committee, who published research into anti-Semitism, for $5,000 for his first study. In December, the chairman wrote that they did not normally fund research but they were bowled over by his enthusiasm: ‘One of the chief reasons for my interest in this project … is my realisation of its great meaning for you. Research which has poured into it a considerable amount of the researcher’s libido … turns out to be much more significant than research which is done for other reasons.’

  Sherif wrote back gratefully: ‘[T]his particular research plan means an awful lot to me … [if it] will further just a little bit our understanding of group frictions and thereby eventually contribute one whit to their elimination, this will be the greatest reward for me.’

  But he must have had his doubts about whether he’d be able to pull off what he had in mind. His plan was audacious and daring.

  Among Sherif’s papers there’s a copy of the training manual for a four-day course for summer-camp staff. Titled Camping with Children, or Living and Learning Democratic Human Relations Together, the twenty-five-page handbook describes in detail what makes a good camp counsellor, and was a blueprint for staff training at the time. The ideal camp counsellor was someone well-versed in child and group psychology; who could foster cooperation and build strong relationships between the children; who was a good role model, an inspiring leader, a skilful problem-solver, and an empathic listener who offered counselling and guidance. The counsellor was responsible for the ‘happiness of their campers’, and happy campers were those who paid attention to and were responsible for other campers and staff.

  The manual presents an idealistic and humanistic vision of summer camp as a place that develops children to be good leaders and responsible citizens who care for others, and ensures the greatest benefit for the group by developing the skills to live and work in harmony. But the experimental summer camp Sherif had in mind would require camp staff to do the opposite of their training: to abandon ideas of fair play and democracy and swap their commitment to the happiness of each boy in their care for the pursuit of scientific research.

  While the camp counsellors were running a standard summer camp, with its usual activities — swimming, archery, hiking, sing-a-longs around the campfire — there would be a second, behind-the-scenes camp to conduct. In this shadow camp, experimenters would pull strings to ensure not a single happy group of campers but two hostile groups who viewed each other with suspicion. One layer of the camp would be the world as it should be — democratic, harmonious, fair — and the other would be the world perhaps as Sherif saw it — unjust, divided, full of violence and conflict.

  For Sherif, finding staff who would embrace an upside-down summer camp, one that inverted an American institution and encouraged all the behaviours standard camps aimed to eradicate, would be no small job. And how would he gain the approval of parents to entrust their children into his care?

  Sherif’s letters to parents are a lesson in the art of skilful deception and subtle persuasion. And he got better at them as time went on. Taking a leaf out of his mentor Carl Hovland’s book, Sherif used trusted sources in the community to allay suspicion and persuade parents of the benefits of allowing their boys to participate. In his letters, he appealed to the parents’ interests and provided just enough information to get their consent without alarming them about what might be in store.

  For his first experiment in 1949, Sherif asked Episcopalian ministers in New Haven to identify and give him the addresses of poor and underprivileged families with eleven-year-old sons. He reasoned that such families were more likely to be swayed by the offer of a free camp. His subjects needed to be of ‘normal or higher intelligence, with no physical defects or serious emotional problems’. Sherif reassured ministers that religious observances would be maintained at the camp, with Sunday services and staff leading boys in saying grace before meals. Sherif was confident: he wrote in notes beforehand that, given the camp was free and included food, ‘it will be easy to get boys’.

  In his letter to parents, he was vague on details: ‘The Yale Department of Psychology is co-operating in a study of child relations and social organization among children’, he wrote. A condition of agreement was for parents ‘not to visit’ because it might ‘distract’ the boys. In a draft of his final report on the experiment, he later wrote with satisfaction, ‘The parents and the boys were told that new methods of camping were being tried out. They never suspected there were any psychologists in the camp. They did not know that any manipulation of conditions for experimental purposes would be done or observations of behavior made.’ However, Sherif was bothered that some boys in the study were loners who had been reluctant to join in group activities.

  For his second experiment in 1953, Sherif recruited boys from in and around Schenectady, New York. When he contacted local ministers, he was more specific about who he was looking for: ‘middle class … normal, healthy Protestant boys’ aged ten-and-a-half to twelve-and-a-half who were ‘well adjusted … “typical American Type”[s] who were “group minded” and who came from well-adjusted families, not from “broken homes”’. He didn’t want boys with signs of ‘delinquency or involved emotional problems such as frustration, strong mother attachment, etc.’ He didn’t want boys who were ‘cissies’ or ‘social isolates’, or boys who were ‘primarily interested in solitary recreational pursuits and hobbies: fishing, insect collecting, stamp collecting, etc.’

  His letter to the parents was different, too:

  For many years camp executives throughout the country have been trying to find out what camp activities will result in giving their campers a fruitful educational and recreational experience. These camp directors are interested in finding out what things can be done to give their boys and girls a wholesome cooperative living experience which will prepare the youngsters for better citizenship and to be leaders in their communities. The question is what camp programs best serve to enrich the life and experiences of growing children?

  The purpose of this camp was ‘simply to study the best programs and procedures for campers which will develop cooperative and spiritual living’.

  Instead of appealing to parents’ pockets, this time Sherif appealed to their aspirations for their children. The boys would be ‘carefully selected’; successful boys would receive a ‘scholarship’. He emphasised that the study was auspiced by prestigious institutions, including Yale and Union College. His letter portrays the camp as benign and instructive, and selection as a camper a privilege. There was no indication that parents were volunteering their children for a three-week psychological experiment that would require them to navigate some dubious moral terrain.

  Fat, thin, quick-witted, slow, tall, short, outgoing, shy — William Golding would have identified each boy in his classroom by his distinguishing characteristics. But on the ancient hilltop at Figsbury Ring, their individuality was lost, and they merged into warring tribes.


  Muzafer Sherif was not nearly as interested in individual boys as he was in groups. Already in the design of the recruitment letters he sent to ministers and parents, his focus was on their similarities, rather than their differences. In all three camp studies, he chose boys who were ‘homogenous’, their individuality swallowed up in generic categories of age, religion, hobbies, and family background.

  By now I was gripped by the story of the experiments and had decided to write about them, but the characters were slippery. Encountering the experiments for the first time myself, it was difficult to keep track of individual boys — especially since in retellings of the experiments, Sherif and subsequent generations of social psychologists have often conflated his three camp studies so that the groups become even more blurred. And while this sense of anonymity, of universality, adds to the power of Sherif’s conclusions, it allows us to forget these groups of subjects were made up of individuals, each with a particular history and personality. What did they each make of the adult observers and their watchful distance from activities that would usually bring camp counsellors hurrying to intervene? When did they each notice that the usual rules for summer camp did not apply, and how did they feel about this?

  By imagining them as a crowd, a mob, a mass, I felt complicit in a process of forgetting and erasure. But this is the dilemma of social psychological research: that the human subject becomes an object representative of a world of the social psychologist’s imagining. In the process of gaining insight into human social life, the researcher loses sight of what it is that makes us human — those qualities that define us as separate and unique.

  In telling the story of his research, Sherif had plenty of material, in the form of observation notes, photographs, and even some film footage, much of which he never used in his final published reports. Of course, a process of selection is inevitable when social scientists are writing up their research, as they sift, choose, and shape the material they have into a story. But what’s often fascinating is what they leave out.

  It seemed to me that in order to tell a balanced story, one that gave equal weight to the perspective of the researcher and the researched, scientist and subject, I had to re-create the world of Sherif’s summer camp and, in a story until now narrated by social psychologists and professors, make space for the voices and memories of the boys themselves.

  3

  Lost and Found

  Perhaps science’s obsession with the notion of the lost boy began with nineteenth-century studies of feral children and the insights they offered into human nature. Perhaps psychology’s obsession started with Little Albert — or maybe it started long before him.

  In the winter of 1919–1920, eleven-month Albert was a rosy-cheeked blond baby whose mother worked at the hospital at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, where the charismatic Doctor John Watson, regarded as the father of Behaviorism, had set up an infant laboratory. You can see pictures of Little Albert online, leaning away from Watson, who is looming over him, wearing a scary mask. Little Albert is famous as the child subject who proved Watson’s theory that emotional responses can be learned and unlearned, a process that became known as classical conditioning. Watson paired the loud and frightening noise of a hammer hitting a metal bar with the appearance of a small rat. Albert, who had reached happily for the animal at first, soon came to associate it with the terrifying noise and became agitated and afraid whenever the rat — and, later, other furry animals — appeared. We’ll never know whether Albert’s mother volunteered Albert willingly and discovered too late what the research involved, or whether she was coerced to hand Albert over. But she took Albert away abruptly, before Watson and his assistant, graduate student Rosalie Rayner, had a chance to de-condition the baby’s fear of furry animals.

  Soon afterwards, Watson, the psychologist superstar, was sacked from his position at Johns Hopkins University for having an extramarital affair with the twenty-one-year-old Rayner. The scandal made front-page news across the country, and the pair fled to Manhattan. After a shaky start, Watson enjoyed a successful second career as an advertising executive.

  The fate of Little Albert was unlikely to be so lucky, according to Watson and Rayner. Historian of psychology Ben Harris noted that although at first they said that any fear he experienced during the experiments was transitory, in a magazine article in 1920 they wrote that Little Albert ‘had probably suffered permanent harm’, a claim made not from callousness so much as to emphasise the power of the conditioning they had conducted on the baby. So the mystery of what happened to Little Albert and how he was affected by the experiment remained.

  In his review of variations of the Little Albert story in textbooks, Harris points to significant deviations in Watson’s own reporting of the research, and writes about how startled he was to read the original article in which Watson and Rayner commented on their lack of success in inducing fear in the rosy-cheeked baby. The story has evolved over time, embroidered and shaped to support a particular theoretical standpoint and to make a comment about psychology in general — and, as Harris points out, to portray Watson as a martyred hero in the development of the discipline. ‘He undertakes work that no one else would,’ Harris writes of the perception of Watson that took hold. ‘He unemotionally pursues the truth while surrounded by the superstitious. Unfortunately, his perfectly designed experiment on Albert was cut short by the infant’s ignorant, ungrateful mother. Blackmailed by his wife, betrayed by Albert’s mother, Watson becomes a tragic figure, a victim of his single-minded pursuit of science.’

  If Watson was portrayed as the tragic star of this famous story, what of Little Albert? Historians of psychology have been on the trail of the now elderly or deceased Albert. Psychological sleuths Hall P. Beck, Sharman Levinson, and Gary Irons were the first to claim that they’d found ‘psychology’s lost boy’. Albert, they wrote in 2009, was a child called Douglas Merritte who had died aged six of hydrocephalus. His mother had worked as a wet nurse at the orphanage opposite the hospital where Watson and Rayner were based and volunteered her baby for the research.

  Such was Little Albert’s fame by the time of the researchers’ discovery that the BBC sent a film crew to record them visiting Merritte’s grave. Their find elicited huge public sympathy for the child. One reader commented on a blog that featured the story, ‘Little Albert is and will stay the James Dean of psychology, an experimental icon.’

  In an update on the story in 2012, psychology professor Alan Fridlund and his co-authors argued that Watson knew during the experiment that baby Douglas had a neurological condition with symptoms that affected his motor and social skills and would have influenced his behavioural conditioning. They argued that in failing to disclose that his results were based on the behaviour of a child who was gravely ill, Watson had engaged not only in a serious breach of experimental ethics but also perpetuated a case of academic fraud.

  The story was widely reported, and by 2014 a new myth was born, with psychology textbooks amending their portrayal of both Little Albert and Watson — the child portrayed as ‘neurologically impaired’ and the experimenter as ‘recklessly unethical’. Even authors of non-academic psychology books incorporated the story; for example, Joel Levy’s Freudian Slips: all the psychology you need to know points out that ‘… since Little Albert was not a healthy child, whatever value the study may have is destroyed, along with the remains of Watson’s reputation’.

  But the Little Albert story was not over. In 2014, with the help of a professional genealogist, and after close examination of Watson’s film footage, psychologist Russell Powell and his colleagues concluded that Douglas Merrite was not Little Albert: they had found a more likely candidate. Little Albert, they argued, was a healthy child called Albert Barger. Quite apart from rescuing Watson’s reputation, here was an opportunity to put Watson’s claims for the power of learned responses in childhood to the test. Was adult Albert still frightened of furry a
nimals?

  Sadly, the researchers couldn’t ask Albert himself because he had died in 2007, at the age of eighty-seven. Instead they turned to the recollections of Albert’s niece, who had been close to her uncle. The results were tantalisingly inconclusive. She reported that throughout his life Albert’s family had teased him about his aversion to dogs, and recounted how dogs had to be kept in another room if Uncle Albert was visiting. Was this, as Albert had explained to the family, the after-effects of seeing his pet dog killed by a car when he was a young child? Or was it a legacy of Watson and Rayner’s experiment? Either way, the researchers concluded that Albert had never been told of his role in Watson’s research.

  If Little Albert was psychology’s original ‘lost boy’, it seemed to me that Sherif’s subjects — from all three studies — were in some sense his descendants, and his compatriots: the lost boys. No one had ever set out to find them; no one had ever tracked them down. Like most of the subjects in psychology experiments in the first half of the twentieth century, they were nameless, faceless individuals who disappeared back into ordinary life once the experiment was over. Would finding them provide any definitive conclusions about the power of Sherif’s experiment? Would they carry some hidden legacy from the research they took part in as children? And what message had they each taken away from the experience, about themselves or about other people? Would they have grown up as warmongers, or peacemakers, or did the experiment have no effect on them at all? And what were their individual stories? Would finding the boys from the ‘lost’ experiment in 1953, with its hints of mutiny or resistance, provide a missing piece in the story of Robbers Cave?