by Gina Perry
This was not the way the boys expected the men to behave — particularly not when it came to adjudicating at a baseball game. Baseball was a hugely popular sport and many of the boys would have been members of the Little League, which, in the wake of World War II, was being used as a vehicle for promoting the values of American democracy. Boys were taught that in Little League, rules were applied in a spirit of fairness, and if there was a dispute, adult umpires made even-handed and just judgements based on what they observed. ‘This type of loyalty is the same thing we call good citizenship as applied to the city, that we call patriotism as applied to the country,’ noted William J. Baker in Playing with God: religion and modern sport. Above all, boys were expected to learn how to win and lose graciously. In Little League, boys learned the value of ‘good-natured’ competition, where there was no lashing out, and no one left with hard feelings.
Sherif, it seemed, had made a major tactical error in conceiving of sport, and baseball in particular, as a metaphor for war, and that in losing a baseball game one team would turn on the other for revenge. Herb Kelman and Jim Carper wrote later that this was a major problem with the experiment: ‘Here a cultural pattern of sportsmanship came into play. There is rivalry while the tournament lasts but little transfer to other aspects of the relationship.’ The boys had had ‘specific training in discrimination between situations of competition in sports (where aggression is socially approved) and other interpersonal or intergroup relations …’
Brian agreed that in baseball the concept of fair play was paramount. ‘Once the game was over, you had to line up and shake the hand of every other person on the opposite team, no matter how bad you might have felt if you’d lost.’ It was an inclusive and forgiving sport. ‘I was never really good at baseball,’ Brian told me, ‘but I was never made to feel bad about it. People encouraged you for trying.’
Doug was insistent that the experimental team had made a major blunder. ‘They missed the point. The point was to try to have us lose sight of what we’d been taught since we were little boys, and that was sportsmanship. You might want to fight tooth and nail over your ability to win a ballgame over another group, but you would not fight physically with them afterwards because that would have made you a lesser person. Your victory would have been snatched right away from you, you would have been considered a loser, not a winner. So I think whoever put two groups of kids and had them fighting over sports didn’t understand American kids,’ Doug told me emphatically. ‘I know that sounds pretty romantic, a romanticised version of what took place, but the facts bore it out, didn’t they?’
Later that same afternoon Harry Ness agreed to call a meeting for the boys to ‘discuss their complaints’ in the mess hall. Carper hid in the rafters to watch, and turned on the tape recorder they had secretly installed there.
At first, it was pandemonium. Listening to the tape, I had to take the headphones off as the voices roared in my ears. The boys were lined up on each side of the long table, shouting accusations. The Panthers accused the Pythons of cutting the flagpole rope because they were sore losers. The Pythons, insulted, yelled back in shrill and angry voices. ‘We did not! You did it!’
‘Why would we cut our own flag down?’ one Panther yelled. I pictured Nathan, always quick to anger. ‘We paid for it with our own money!’
‘No one in our group has a knife!’ a Python retorted, and their individual voices were lost in the roar of protests.
Peter, the oldest Panther, sat down abruptly at the table and tapped on it until the yelling died down. But the boys on both sides shifted and muttered. Peter looked around at the boys in his group and then waved his hand at the Pythons, who were lined up on the other side of the table. ‘If any of these guys had cut it, they would have told us. They can’t keep it to themselves.’ He grinned at Laurence.
There was some laughter from both sides of the room.
‘We’re not such sore losers that we’d go and do something like cut the rope.’ Laurence pulled out a chair and sat down too. Around him, the other boys muttered their agreement.
‘Who said we did it?’ Laurence wanted to know. ‘Where did you get the idea we had a grudge?’ He looked at Peter and the rest of the Panthers.
The Panthers looked around at one another but no one seemed to remember exactly where the idea had come from. If anyone remembered that Mr Mussee, the caretaker, had implied it was the Pythons, they didn’t say.
Peter stood up abruptly and called his group into a huddle and they whispered intently, arms around one another’s shoulders. The Pythons looked on, pretending they weren’t trying to listen. The huddle broke up and Peter announced, ‘Okay, if you all swear on the Bible, we’ll believe you didn’t cut the flagpole rope.’
One by one the Pythons stood and put their hand on the Bible, which rested on a folded American flag. Laurence went first, wriggling to get comfortable and clearing his throat as if he was about to make a speech, causing the boys to laugh. Then he said solemnly, ‘I swear by the Bible and the flag that I did not cut the flagpole rope.’ A wobbly cheer went up. John went next, drawing more applause. As each Python boy made his pledge, the others clapped and whistled. When it was Tony’s turn, he added ‘the Father, Son and Holy Ghost’ to his pledge, and there was approving applause. Ill will between the two groups evaporated: Carper observed from his hiding place in the rafters that ‘this reduced most of the violent hostility’. Any conflict had fizzled.
Carper’s description of the meeting in the mess hall would offer no comfort to Sherif. The boys had resolved their differences and disappointed the researchers’ expectations.
Sherif, desperate to ‘increase hostility’, told Ness to announce after supper that night that the staff ‘forgot’ to add some events to the tournament. They had craft activities and songs and skits already scheduled, but added more competitive activities. Ness told the groups that Capture the Flag was added, as well as a second tug of war and a treasure hunt. Then Sherif hurried away with Herb Kelman.
The Panthers were immediately suspicious when the additions to the tournament were announced. They guessed that Ness was favouring the Pythons, giving them a chance to get ahead. They were right.
The day before, after his baseball injury Doug had ended up in the infirmary a second time in as many days — which explained to me why he thought he had been in hospital. Once again, his homesickness had flared, and Sussman had convinced Sherif they were better off letting the boy go home, in case his homesickness became ‘contagious’. Doug’s parents were arriving that night to take him home. While Ness was making his announcement about additions to the tournament, Harvey was walking the ‘downcast’ Doug along the track towards the road. Harvey wrote that the two caretakers, Mr Mussee and Mr Herbie — Sherif and Kelman — caught up with them and offered to carry Doug’s things. Doug seems to have been having second thoughts, especially given the Panthers’ victory that day and the chance to be with his friends from the other group again. But it was too late; his father had likely already arrived and was waiting, engine running, at the turn-off to the camp.
Sherif, intent on gathering ‘data’ from the boy before he left, asked Doug why he thought the Panthers were winning everything, clearly hoping for an answer that showed ‘glorification’ of his group. But Doug shrugged. ‘Luck, I guess … I guess we have more confidence.’ Harvey picked up the questioning. What did Doug think of his Panther group? ‘They’re all good guys, every one of them, even in the other group, I love them all,’ Doug answered.
Night was falling, and I imagined they walked the rest of the way in silence, the air fizzing with insects, Doug regretful about not getting a knife, and Sherif thinking it was best that the boy went home after all. When they saw the glow of headlights, they would have stopped, and Sherif and Kelman would have handed over Doug’s bags.
Doug doesn’t remember that evening, but he looked up Muzafer Sherif online and even though ‘it
seems impossible … but darned if I don’t think I recall that face. He looked serious, dark, a little scary.’ I imagined this memory was from Doug’s last glimpse of Sherif, turning away with a scowl in the half dark and melting into the shadows, leaving Harvey to see Doug off.
The next day, Monday 2 August, the third day of the tournament was rigged in favour of the Pythons to ‘increase morale’. Sussman and Sherif decided that keeping the scores of the two teams level would increase aggression and competitiveness between them. The Panthers were given a longer route in treasure hunt, the clues were harder to find, and staff deliberately slowed them down. Camp inspection was scheduled at the same time as the Panthers’ kitchen duty, so they had less time to clean up their tent. By the time the ballgame was announced, the Panthers, who were already commenting on the favouritism Ness was showing to the Pythons, refused to play if Ness was umpire, accusing him of ‘cheating them’ and calling him ‘a dirty bastard’ among themselves.
Sherif engineered another frustration episode before dinner, taking items of the Panther clothing and hiding them in the Pythons’ tent, then smearing the Panthers’ table with the Pythons’ leftover food. But the Panthers didn’t take the bait. They attributed the missing clothes to a mix-up with the laundry, and while they were irritated about the mess on their table, and threatened to do the same to the Pythons, they never followed through on it.
On the barometer in the mess hall, the Pythons, until now the losing team, began to pull ahead. But the adults’ tactics had become increasingly clear, particularly to the Panthers, who now expected that they would be discriminated against. I imagined that the Panthers would have been feeling angry, but also vulnerable, given they were far from home with adults who seemed biased against them. They were only ten and eleven, too young to have developed the teenage bravado that could hide feelings of fear or anxiety. Sherif seemed not to have noticed that he was testing a completely different group dynamic — the effect of discrimination by a group with more power and authority on the self-esteem and performance of a less powerful group.
The boys’ unhappiness showed itself in their treatment of one another too. Kelman wrote that instead of directing their anger to their opponents, the Panthers had turned on one another as well as blaming the adults. This competition phase was supposed to bring each team together, but after each game there was recriminations and bickering.
There was bullying happening in Carper’s Pythons group too. ‘I had a fight with one of the boys, another Python,’ Walt Burkhard told me. ‘I don’t remember what it was about, but I remember getting hold of a t-shirt of his and cutting it up with a pocket knife. I don’t know what it was I was so angry about, but it was so out of character for me, especially pulling out a pocket knife to do some damage. I’ve never done anything like this again.’
It was hard to imagine Walt, this rather shy, softly spoken man, ‘raising hell’. He had a youthful face, hatched round the eyes with fine lines, and bristly grey hair. Even though I got to the San Diego café before him, he was not the type to approach someone he’d never met. Instead, when he arrived he took a table outside and waited for me to come and find him. ‘You can ask me any questions you want,’ he said. But he paused over each snippet of memory or vague recollection as if weighing it for accuracy.
Walt looked troubled, recalling the self of this 1953 summer camp. As a professor of computer science, he was used to problems with clear solutions, but the behaviour of his eleven-year-old self in the summer of 1953 was a puzzle he was still trying to solve.
By the fourth day of the tournament, as the antagonism between the two groups failed to materialise, tension was building among the staff. On one side of the divide was Carper and Kelman; on the other was Sherif, Sussman, Harvey and White.
The archery contest that day was a turning point where the differences between the two groups of men became clear, with Kelman and Carper maintaining their role as observers, and the others acting more like participants. The clearing where the archery range was set up was small, a patch of short grass encircled by broad, leafy trees. It was cooler, with the wind stirring the trees, striping the edges of the grass with bands of shadow and light. Carper observed that there was a lot of ‘fraternising’ going on between boys on opposite teams: they helped one another retrieve arrows and yelled encouragement to their opponents. Kelman wrote that ‘there was very little name-calling or serious hostility on the part of either group’. Perhaps because the archery conjured happy memories of the first couple of days, the boundaries between the two teams vanished. Boys on both sides cried out in admiration when an arrow landed with a ‘puck’ in the target, no matter which team the archer was on.
Jack White decided to take action. He tried to round up his Panther group, summoning Peter, who was coaching Laurence on how to better hold his bow, and telling Irving, who had joined Walt and Eric in the Python line, not to talk to the other team. But Carper and Kelman made no effort to stop the two teams from mixing. There might have been little hostility between the two groups of boys, but between the staff tensions were brewing.
During the fifth day of the tournament, amid a game of football, it got too much for Marvin Sussman, who likely saw the whole summer of hard work about to be wasted and his book chapter with Sherif slipping away. When he arrived partway through the game, Sussman was infuriated to see Carper allowing boys from both groups to crowd around ‘in a concerned manner’ when a boy was hurt during play.
In Sussman’s eyes, Carper was clearly encouraging a friendly atmosphere and wasn’t doing enough to promote rivalry and retaliation among the boys. Carper described the many ‘gestures of friendship’ between the two teams, but Sussman believed he should have been doing more to stop it. Sussman’s notes for Sherif bristled with impatience and irritation: ‘The game was being slowed down by the poor refereeing and the lack of enthusiasm of some of the counsellors in charge of the boys.’
Sussman took over, replacing Carper as referee and speeding up the game so the boys had to play faster and harder. He also overlooked rules in favour of the Pythons to keep the overall tournament scores neck and neck. Sussman wrote a particular note at the end of his description of the game, pointing out that if he, Sussman, had been in charge of the game from the start, it would have ‘resulted in the hostility desired for this stage … and the conflict situation which was called for’. He went on, ‘In terms of the experimental design this game should have been speeded up, the boys encouraged to “fight” their hardest, much as a good coach does with his football team, and the football rules should have been overlooked when necessary so as to satisfy the conditions set for this activity and stage.’ In short, Sussman was saying to Sherif, let me take over. With me in charge, the experiment will be a success.
That night, Sherif gave his approval and told Sussman to replace Carper. Sherif’s reason for getting rid of Carper was not because he wasn’t intervening actively enough: he and Sussman, unable to countenance the idea that some boys might have seen through the ruse, accused Carper of spreading the ‘rumor’ that the camp was an experiment. ‘The expose of the experiment became a “joke” with some of the members of staff,’ Sussman wrote sourly. Years later, Sherif told a graduate student that the study failed because a ‘fellow from Yale told the kids that they were being studied’. But Carper’s notes were littered with examples of the boys’ own suspicions about the camp, from the first day when Harold asked what the microphones in the rafters were for, to the accusations that they had been separated to see how they would respond, to the unfair penalties imposed by the adults in games. Sherif could not believe that the boys would have noticed anything without one of the adults giving the game away. On the other hand, Carper noticed how alert, curious, and observant the boys were to the adults and their surroundings. The day before, Carper had written that when Harvey approached some of the Python boys with the idea of a boxing match, one boy ‘introduced the subject of trickery’ an
d others chipped in with their suspicions, saying, ‘You want to make us fight the others.’
Maybe it was the heat in the small, stuffy office where he and Sussman met that day after the game. Maybe it was that Carper felt sorry for Sussman and the impossible job he had taken on — he was likely looking exhausted after almost three weeks of sitting up until the small hours of the morning, night after night, with Sherif drinking and pacing and agonising, and going over and over every small detail. But Carper didn’t protest when Sussman told him he was being replaced. Perhaps Carper was relieved to give up what by now he saw as a charade. He had little tolerance for duplicity. He had rebelled against the hypocrisy of his father, a pious and peace-loving member of the Mennonite community in public who, behind closed doors, beat his son often. Whenever he went home, he enjoyed showing off his secular lifestyle — smoking, offering his nephews and nieces sips of liquor from a flask. But Carper bit back his scepticism about the experiment that he would in fact describe in later years to colleagues as a ‘joke’, and agreed to take on whatever other duties were needed before the experiment ended.
As for Herb Kelman, he had been taking his role as ‘scientific conscience’ too seriously for Sherif’s liking, especially when Kelman objected to the men’s behaviour at the nightly staff meeting after the archery contest. ‘I pointed out that they were going beyond observation of behaviour. You’re supposed to observe, not to directly influence the way the boys respond because that’s manipulation. There were points at which OJ and Jack, who were students of Sherif’s and very close to him, would push things along … to encourage certain kinds of behaviours … People don’t necessarily do it consciously, I’ve great respect for these people, but they were students of Sherif’s and dependent on him. They were in a very delicate, tricky situation.’ Kelman didn’t say it, but Sherif’s watchful presence around the campsite as well as his own spontaneous interventions would have encouraged them too. But I was surprised when I read that Sherif, after this staff meeting, decided to exclude Kelman from all future meetings. Sherif had anticipated the potential for this kind of bias to happen at the start and had engaged Kelman to guard against it. Yet the very thing that Sherif had wanted to avoid he found impossible to resist.