by Gina Perry
It felt like more than just a case of scientific scrupulousness at work here — something akin instead to an exaggerated fear of failure. Even acknowledging Sherif’s anxieties about the need for the experiment to go well, his close supervision and desire to detail everything meticulously gave the impression of a man who didn’t seem to trust the men working for him to get things right.
On the other hand, Sherif had an intellectual energy that swept others along. I can picture him striding up and down in front of his assembled team in the small room that served as an office, gesturing emphatically, his face glowing with heat and excitement, urging the men to remember the momentousness of this research, just as he had persuaded superiors at his university of the magnitude of his work. His staff were all young men at the beginning of their psychology careers, inspired and perhaps even a little overawed to be invited to work with a theoretician of his stature. If Sherif went on too long, if he repeated himself or sounded at times as if he was haranguing them, it was because they had not yet proved themselves. But did the men catch one another’s eye if he went on like this, I wondered, or did they look away?
As Sherif read the men’s typed notes, he marked points that needed following up with two dark pencil strokes in the margin, like exclamation marks without the points. In his notes on the second day, Carper naively included conjecture that went beyond observations of what he saw and heard among the boys. He noted the boys’ ‘apathy for organised sports’, suggesting it might be due to poor selection procedures — a remark that likely would have annoyed Sussman, given how much effort it had taken him. Carper’s comment would have bothered Sherif too: not just because it suggested scientific sloppiness but also because so much of the later conflict Sherif was planning revolved around competitive games. Perhaps Carper offered this observation to impress Sherif, not considering that it might light a fuse of antagonism.
Jack White’s notes, on the other hand, could be describing a completely different day. There is no mention of the boys’ reluctance or resistance towards group games. He stated which boys took charge and which boys were happy to take turns in archery, Horseshoes, and badminton. In White’s notes, boys volunteered to carry sporting equipment and to be captains for each team. White observed which boys were the best players. In contrast to Carper’s, White’s notes indicated that things were proceeding according to plan. I wondered about this discrepancy and remembered the photo of Sherif, smiling and relaxed, flanked by Jack White and OJ Harvey, and how, unlike in the other photos, where Sherif stood apart from the others, in this one he looked connected to these two men, as if an invisible string ran around and between them, binding them together. Of all the men, these two knew Sherif best, and with both using the experiment as the basis for their PhDs, they had as much invested in the experiment as Sherif himself.
I pored over these two versions of the same afternoon. In the discrepancies between these accounts lay the problem of this kind of research — despite Sherif’s best efforts to standardise the process, subjectivity could never be eliminated. But it seemed more than just a difference in point of view: the contrast between what Carper and White observed was stark. Jack White was thoroughly familiar with the details of Sherif’s work; his own dissertation was based on Sherif’s theory. From White’s vantage point, things were running smoothly, whereas Carper’s told another story. It seemed that already the men’s observations were being shaped by their point of view. But whose version would Sherif believe? Perhaps it was as early as this, the second day of the experiment, that the rift among the experimental team began.
At the end of the second night, after he’d reviewed Carper’s and White’s notes with the others, Sherif took Sussman and crossed the campsite in the darkness to the small tent Sherif had reserved for his own use, tucked away at the edge of the woods. As they would every night from this point, they stayed up into the small hours, Sussman typing up the next day’s events and Sherif refining and Sussman retyping. I can picture Sussman sitting and Sherif pacing in the tent, lit only by torch beam, discussing how they could make the boys interact. From the outside, the tent would have been an illuminated triangle, and even if one of the boys had seen it from the mess hall, they would likely not have realised anything was amiss.
Eventually the events were set. In my imagination, Sussman lit his pipe and began typing the script for the next morning’s announcement as Sherif paced back and forth, smoking. It was a script that, for the boys, would change everything.
The next morning, Saturday 26 July, the boys gathered after breakfast, as they’d been told, outside the recreation hall. Their luggage — a pile of suitcases and duffel bags, blankets and pillows — were piled up on the grass. Harry Ness made a carefully scripted announcement, but even Sussman’s final typed version Sherif had annotated with pencil, adding stage directions in parentheses:
The boys can now move into their permanent quarters, which consist of two tents. In announcing this mention that … the new arrangement will be much superior: sleeping facilities won’t be as congested, and also the rec hall will now be available for recreational facilities.
Ness then announces: “The following boys will be together in one tent. As I read your names, come up and stand here (point to one side).” He reads the names of one “group”. He then says: “The following boys will be in the other tent. As I read your names, come up and stand here (point to other side).”
(Note) While the names are being read and the boys are lining up, movies and pictures should be taken. Observers should note the reactions of the boys.
I don’t know what excuse, if any, the men used with the boys for taking photos this morning, although they are shot from a distance, as if the photographers might have been hiding themselves from view. There are a handful of pictures, as well as some film footage of this event. One photo is taken from the rec hall, looking down the slope to where Ness — tall as a bean pole, his pale legs glowing, wearing a white baseball cap — is speaking to the campers, who surround him in a half-circle.
The next photo is taken just a moment later, but from the front, facing Ness, after he has finished his announcement. The orderly half-circle is disrupted: some boys have stepped towards Ness, others have turned away. Most look dejected. Pairs that staff had noticed having fun together — including John and Doug, Peter and Laurence, Walt and Irving — have been separated and put in different groups.
Peter argued with Ness, telling him they should be allowed to stay with their friends and that he didn’t want to be separated from Laurence. Laurence, usually quick with a joke, looked ready to cry. When Ness insisted, Peter looked disgusted and turned away. Three more boys asked Ness if they could swap groups, and Jack White noticed another two boys crying as they went to get their luggage. The boys were upset that Ness, who had been so permissive since they arrived, allowing them to pursue their interests and their friendships freely, was now breaking them up in an arbitrary way and ignoring their pleas to be in a tent with their friends. Ness, the one the boys were told made all the decisions about what happened at camp, was in fact the fall guy, the one Sherif hoped the boys would blame instead of the other staff for ‘changes in policy … that might seem strange to the children’.
Sherif was jubilant at the boys’ misery because his first hypothesis had been proven. Note the displeasure of Ss (meaning subjects), he later wrote on the back of one of the photos. The boys’ sadness at being separated was a measure of their friendships. The stage was set for the next phase — what happens when friends are divided and end up on opposite sides in competing groups.
5
Initiation
The tents were a quarter of a mile apart, on opposite sides of a stream. The boys reluctantly gathered up their bags and belongings, with help from the caretakers Sherif and Kelman, and took them to their respective tents. Carper’s group was on the west side of the stream.
Harold, still carrying his Popular Mec
hanics magazine, wasn’t surprised they had been split up. He had noticed the men watching as they played games the day before, and when he saw the junior counsellors conferring with Harry Ness that morning, he guessed what they had in mind. Harold told Jim Carper that he knew the men had been watching to find out who the boys’ friends were and then separated them so they could make new friends. Carper insisted this wasn’t true but he included the information in his daily notes. Yet Harold must have kept his suspicions to himself because Walt, who was in the same group, remembers the separation as a shock. ‘We did everything together in those first couple of days. We got to know each other and developed a real sense of camaraderie.’
Looking back, Doug thinks their distress at being put in different groups says something about the situation the boys found themselves in. ‘When you think about it, there were twenty-four boys and none of us knew each other. We didn’t come from the same communities, neighbourhoods, or schools, so the fact that in just one or two days we became that friendly that we didn’t want to be divided is telling. I’m wondering if the place was so darn spooky that we didn’t want to be divided for that reason. Because this campsite was not your standard summer camp, with a pretty lodge and its little cabins or lean-tos. This was the woods, and you were a long way from your home, and I don’t get the sense that the counsellors were trying to be our buddies and supportive, so all in all it had to be a fairly unpleasant experience for everybody. Maybe we just felt, “At least we have each other.”’
Sherif wrote that after the boys had been moved to their new tents, ‘the pain of separation was assuaged by allowing each group to go at once on a hike and camp out’. But his notes were a case of wishful thinking. Distracting the boys from being separated would not be as simple as that. Soon after the boys were taken to their new tents, the men realised that Mickey, a quiet, stocky boy, was missing. Harvey, Sussman, and Ness fanned out across the campsite, but Mickey was nowhere to be found. Harvey and Ness got in the truck and drove up the road, and Kelman’s notes quote Harvey’s description of the scene. They spotted the boy ‘one mile from the camp in a fast run. He ran into the bushes and hid. When they got him he sobbed loudly all the way back. He said “The boys will call me a sissy” and “Please let me go home.”’ Kelman doesn’t make clear whether they got the boy out by force or by persuasion, but it sounded as if they hadn’t changed his mind. Harvey wrote in his notes that between sobs Mickey told him he ‘didn’t want to come to camp but his mother made him’.
When Mickey was returned to camp, Carper made a fuss of him, and in preparation for the day hike, ‘I gave him the first aid kit to carry.’ The boys were given haversacks, canteens, and mess kits, and some of the boys crowded round ‘excitedly’ to see them, Sherif wrote. Carper asked Mickey to help him assign the other boys their gear. ‘This cheered him quite a bit,’ Carper wrote. I was beginning to like this man. I imagined Mickey felt the same way.
The caretakers led each group on a day hike — the boys were told this was because they knew the area so well. Carper, junior counsellor Rupe, and Kelman, led their group of twelve boys — which included runaway Mickey, shy Walt, jovial Laurence, fisherman John, and Popular Mechanics fan Harold — north. By now Carper had memorised the boys’ names and was free to watch how their relationships were developing.
His started off as a large group, but once the path started to climb, they strung out in a long line. At the head of the group, John, an experienced hiker, kept pace with Kelman, or ‘Mr Herbee’. Behind him, in a loose group of four boys, Laurence, usually the joker, was subdued, flicking a stick at the long grass, saying little. Beside him, Mickey struggled to keep pace, sweating and puffing. The boys were clustered in groups of three of four, and Carper noticed how they avoided talking to Mickey. He had overheard the others complaining about Mickey, how he always wanted to be ‘different’, refusing to join in games, and today carrying his canteen inside his haversack instead hanging from his belt so that every time he stopped for a drink it took ten times longer than anyone else and they had to stop and wait. Faced with their irritation and getting tired, Mickey fell further back, and ‘focussed his attention on the counsellors (usually myself)’, Carper wrote.
They hiked across a meadow, the grass swishing and clouds of midges rising at their approach, with Kelman and John far ahead and the boys strung out in clusters of twos and threes, Mickey and Carper at the tail end. When they stopped beneath a massive spruce tree to rest in the shade, Kelman and Carper quickly conferred. To keep the boys together in a single group, Kelman gave John, who kept racing ahead, a large can of beans to carry to slow him down, and Carper shouldered Mickey’s backpack so he could more easily keep pace. There were certainly scientific reasons why they wouldn’t want to lose a subject from the experiment, but I wondered if I read sympathy in Carper’s notes, as if he could identify with a boy who felt like an outsider.
The day hike was the first of a whole range of group activities Sherif had scheduled for the next five days and the second stage of the experiment. He predicted that at the end of that time, the boys would identify closely with their new group, and would experience a ‘feeling of belongingness’. They would have a clear leader and express their collective identity in shared catchwords, group slogans, and ways of policing rivalry or friction between group members, all visible signs of what he called group norms. It was as though the boys would shed one identity and a new one would take its place. Sherif wrote that for each boy, ‘His sense of personal identity does not and cannot exist independent of the group setting. In short, the individual cannot be considered apart from or in contrast to the groups of which he is a member … the tired but still popular question concerning the individual versus the group … simply evaporates into thin air.’
By the time they got back to camp later that day, sweaty and tired, the men leading both groups had been fielding questions from the boys about their friends in the other group: what they were doing and when they were going to see them. The written instructions to staff were silent on how to handle the boys’ curiosity. It does not seem to have factored into their preparations. Sherif had Sussman instruct the men to tell them the ‘camp was organized to try out different camp activities … they were engaged in different activities and were not to be interrupted’. But this didn’t satisfy the boys and, back a camp, a now-glum Laurence and the other boys in Carper’s group hung around the kitchen and pestered the cook for an explanation. But he said he knew as little as they did. Sherif had Sussman revise the daily schedules and arrange for meals to be served at different times so the groups didn’t cross paths and there would be no contact between them, so it was likely the cook knew a little more than he was letting on.
At different times that afternoon, the adults organised a treasure hunt for each group, to build morale and to get them working as teams. I imagined the boys absorbed in the task, hurrying from clue to clue, in and out of the shade of the woods, down by the stream, to the mess hall, their tent, and back again, as the men silently shadowed them, noting any boys who seemed to take the lead, and which ones seemed happy to follow. Both boys won a $10 prize, as Sherif and Sussman had pre-arranged and noted in the day’s notes.
The second test of how the group was developing was how they made decisions about spending the prize money. Before supper, Jim Carper crept up to his group’s tent and listened outside as the boys discussed what they should buy with their money. The light was fading; one of them jiggled a torch, and shadows jumped and fell on the wall of the tent. ‘Hey,’ someone said, ‘don’t waste the battery.’ I imagine it was John, the practical one, who suggested they use the money to buy a Coleman lamp so they could play games after dark. Maybe it was Walt, one of a family of six boys, who objected that it would be impossible to divide up a lamp once the camp was over, that they should simply divide the money between them.
‘Rubbers, we should buy rubbers!’ one boy said. This sounded like Mickey to me, eager for
attention.
‘You’ve got a head full of rubbers,’ another one said dismissively.
‘We could get a girl for the counsellors, with a conveyor belt so they don’t have to walk out of the tent,’ the boy I guessed was Mickey said loudly. ‘A conveyor belt with a whore at the end of it!’
There was a moment of shocked silence and then a jumble of annoyed voices drowning Mickey out. I imagined Carper straining to identify who was speaking in the excited muddle of voices that followed, suggesting that they use the money to rent a canoe, buy a horse, even buy a hot rod. I imagined his mounting impatience as he listened to this scene and the boys’ inability to settle and make a serious decision, offering instead a raft of increasingly ‘unrealistic suggestions’. How was he supposed to observe who exactly was making suggestions and how they were being received when he was out here in the dark, the mosquitoes whining, tired from the day’s exertion and the prospect of another long night ahead typing up notes before any possibility of going to sleep? And the boys clamouring, calling over one another, offering increasingly half-baked suggestions, no particular boy demonstrating that he had any more influence than the rest. According to Sherif, by now one boy should be taking charge and directing decisions.
But $10 was a huge amount to the boys, worth the equivalent of almost $100 today. In 1953, $10 would buy one hundred sodas, seventy hotdogs, or a week of canoe hire. The amount of money had unsettled them; it seemed excessive, and some were feeling uneasy about the way they’d ‘won’ it. Perhaps the prize money had been a test. They were also still bothered by the mystery of Harry Ness’s about-face and worried that he’d separated them from their friends as punishment. Maybe they could use the money to buy their way back into favour.
‘We should give some money to the counsellors.’