by Gina Perry
While the boys would have thought the tournament and the conflict was over, the men had other plans. The third and final stage of the experiment — the gluing together of the rival groups — could only work if the relationship between the Rattlers and the Eagles was completely broken.
That afternoon, while the Eagles were celebrating their victory at the lake, the Rattlers raided their cabin and stole their medals and knives, tearing the insect screens off the windows, overturning beds, ripping up comics and, down at the creek, setting the Eagles’ boats loose. Sherif’s notes read that ‘a very destructive job was done … staff had to put the brakes on’.
When they returned and saw what had happened, the Eagles, headed by Will, raced across the park to the Rattlers’ cabin. It was the scene of a ‘most dramatic’ fight, Sherif wrote. Will confronted the Rattlers. Red said they would return the knives if the Eagles got on their bellies and crawled. Will demanded that he send someone his size out to fight, but Red just laughed. Will was ‘hysterical’ and rushed forward, and all hell broke loose. ‘They had thrown each other down and were slugging it out and I had to get in and break it up,’ OJ said.
With some trouble, the men separated the boys, and OJ shepherded the Eagles back to their cabin. Will’s voice began to shake as he recounted to OJ how the Rattlers didn’t want to fight fair — there were eleven of them and only nine of the Eagles — and how the counsellors should have taken out those two big boys so the groups were matched. Perhaps it was the sympathy in OJ’s voice, or the sight of the knives and the medals that he had returned to them, or that the adrenaline and anger of the fight was wearing off, but the boys’ earlier bravado evaporated. Sherif, standing outside the cabin listening, described in his notebook how the Eagles ‘… cried and sobbed’ and were ‘confused and insecure’.
‘The end result of the series of competitive contests and reciprocally frustrating encounters between the Eagles and Rattlers was that neither group wanted to have anything whatsoever to do with the other under any circumstances,’ the book states. But OJ was worried that things had gone too far. The emotional distress of the boys, and in particular the Eagles, could create problems with ‘public relations’ — a term he and Sherif used for complaints from parents and action from the university. That night, he and Sherif decided that the boys needed time to recover before the final stage of the experiment began. They kept the two groups separate the next day and took them out to boat and swim.
Giving the boys a day of fun in their own groups was also an attempt to avoid the kind of complaints the Rockefeller Foundation had recently fielded about Sherif’s group study, concerning his and his team’s treatment of the children.
In December 1953, a number of small-town newspapers ran stories about Sherif’s Middle Grove study, based on reports from a conservative journal called Human Events. One editorial, under the sarcastic headline ‘No (Public) Comment’, stated, ‘Dr Sherif deliberately, surreptitiously and secretly planted ideas in the heads of boys and played on their emotions in such a way that the friendly rivalry between the groups was converted into a hostile one. He also worked upon individuals in each group, causing each to brood … causing grudges and resentments.’ The notion of a foreign-sounding scientist preying on the minds of naïve children echoed widespread fears about vulnerable people falling sway to the power of communist brainwashing and propaganda. It also cast the Rockefeller Foundation’s willingness to fund it in a poor light.
Leland C. DeVinney, the Assistant Director of Social Sciences at the Foundation, wrote to his superiors that the articles were ‘sheer invention’ and ‘an astonishing distortion’: ‘fantastically distorted and hostile’. But at least one reader reacted, and wrote to the Foundation directly to ask for more information about Sherif and the study. Even without the implication that it was providing research support to America’s enemies, the Rockefeller Foundation was sensitive to accusations about its funding of research with children, having been at the centre of previous controversies for its financial support of what was deemed unethical experimentation — as early as 1911, Rockefeller-funded bacteriologist Hideyo Noguchi had caused a public scandal after he was accused of infecting children with syphilis.
Upon receiving the letter, DeVinney wrote to Sherif asking him to supply information so he could answer the man’s questions, in particular what exactly was it that parents had been told? When DeVinney answered the letter of complaint he wrote that the parents, ‘while they did not know the study design’, were ‘told this was an experimental camp’. But what he didn’t add was that Sherif had, he wrote to DeVinney, told the parents it was a ‘study of camping procedures’, not a study of intergroup hostility.
The exchange had made Sherif anxious, and both he and OJ were careful at Robbers Cave to keep parents in the dark about the real nature of the study. Throughout, they read all the boys’ outgoing mail to make sure no news was going home that might cause trouble.
I imagine that the day’s break away was a welcome relief for the staff too. The 1949 study had ended at this point, and the 1953 study failed to get the boys fighting. ‘We had never reached this stage before, so it was unknown territory as far as we were concerned,’ OJ said. ‘We had real reason to be concerned about whether we could pull it off.’
9
Sweet Harmony
Carolyn wrote excitedly to Sherif on the first day of the final stage of the experiment, telling him how tempted she had been to call. ‘According to schedule you must be through with fighting (experimentally) and heading towards sweet harmony!’
If only it were that easy.
Before the final stage could begin, Sherif wanted to gather hard data to support his anecdotal evidence that the experiment was working by bringing both groups together to test their attitudes to each other. Bob Hood told the Rattlers he’d made a bet with Jack White that the Rattlers were a better team than the Eagles in certain skills tests. But by now the Rattlers didn’t want anything to do with the others, and refused to participate. In desperation, Hood promised his group $5.00 if they took part. In a bean-tossing competition where the boys had to estimate how well their group did in comparison to the others, each group was much more positive about its own members and regarded themselves as superior in skill to the other team.
In the published version of the study, the men portray the final week of the camp as an epic struggle to overcome the aggression and fighting between the two groups of boys. They described how the boys, waiting for meals outside the mess hall, abused one another, and once inside at the table, ‘After eating for a while, someone threw something, and the fight was on. The fight consisted of throwing rolls, napkins rolled in a ball, mashed potatoes, etc. accompanied by yelling the standardized unflattering words at each other.’ Name-calling and abuse were a feature of every interaction, according to the book. And when things went wrong, the other group generally got the blame: ‘In an early morning swim … the Eagles had discovered their flag in the water, burned the previous evening by the Rattlers. Upon making this discovery, they denounced the Rattlers as “dirty bums”, and accused them … of throwing rocks in their creek (because one of them stubbed his toes a number of times during the swim).’
It makes for uncomfortable reading. Each time the two groups came into contact, whether it was to eat a meal or watch a movie, the men made notes on how they acted, where they sat, and the overall mood between them.
‘We were trying to show just being together doesn’t create peace. You need more than that,’ OJ said.
For the first day, mealtimes were bedlam. Boys on both sides ‘yelled invectives’ and threw food, the book says, while the men hid outside and took notes. On the second day, after joint meals in the mess hall, Ida the cook (who was wife of the camp’s permanent caretaker, Dave Bloxham) and her sister (who worked as kitchenhand) threatened to quit. They were ‘conservative churchgoing people’, OJ said. ‘She was so bothered by the mis
behaviour of the boys, who were throwing food at the other group and cursing each other. The food fights and bad names really bothered the ladies, and they chided Sherif and I for allowing the boys to behave that way,’ OJ said. Ida’s husband Dave took her aside and explained. ‘To our surprise, he had pretty well mapped out what we were doing. He saw that we were trying to create discord and break it down and he had a chat with his wife and sister-in-law and talked them out of quitting.’
My guess was that the boys were angry and upset not only because they felt aggrieved by the cheating behaviour of their opponents but also because they felt betrayed by the camp’s staff. They were confused.
In their published accounts, it is as if the men have let a genie out of the bottle in this final week, but the reality was quite different. Boys on both sides were angry and upset. It made me wonder, how had things become so heated? And why were these boys at Robbers Cave so much more easily drawn into conflict than the boys a year earlier?
Dwayne Hall told me, in his gravelly smoker’s voice, that he thinks it was because all the usual rules were upended. ‘We — our group — we were playing by the rules. But that other team, the Rattlers? After a game, in the middle of the night they attack us and steal our stuff. That’s like —’ He can’t find the word for it. ‘Well, what do we do? We tell our counsellors because that’s not playing fair. We’re like, “You got to disqualify these guys.” But what do the counsellors do? Nothing. Maybe they’re the ones who suggest that we get our own back, maybe it was one of us, I don’t remember. But there was no way that the fighting between us was “natural”. It was crazy — a crazy situation run by crazy people!’ He sounded angry.
What had the others said about the camp, he wanted to know.
He was the only one of the Eagles group I’d managed to find, I told him.
‘Doesn’t matter which group,’ Dwayne said briskly. ‘We were all brought up to play fair and square. You can’t tell me that the boys in that other group didn’t feel bad, didn’t know what they were doing was wrong. I mean, there were these free-for-alls, like a riot or something. I mean, we felt under attack. We were filling our socks with rocks at night. So we were planning to retaliate. I mean, we had to look after ourselves because the counsellors weren’t going to.’
Did the Rattler boys feel betrayed by the men too? They were certainly resisting Bob Hood after the tournament. His inconsistency must have been confusing and upsetting: how he accompanied the Rattler boys on raids but then didn’t take their side when the Eagles clearly broke the rules during tug of war.
Bill Snipes doesn’t remember much about the fights but is confident that they occurred. ‘There was a lot of pushing and shoving. I guess we were pretty mad. Some kids were pretty upset. Our counsellor was with us all the time — they knew about it. How else would eleven-year-old boys hurt each other?’
On the second morning of the last week, when the boys lined up for breakfast, Ida came out from the kitchen and stood at the door to the mess hall to give them a piece of her mind. With all the extra cleaning up she and Ruth had to do because of the boys’ mess, the two had less time to cook. If the boys wanted to eat, they had to behave themselves, the small woman with the neat grey bun told them firmly.
Was it a coincidence that after breakfast that day the Rattlers took a stand against their bully? Back in their cabin, Red, with his penchant for picking on the smaller boys, pulled the comic out of the hands of a boy called Franklin, who was reading on his bunk. Franklin leapt up to grab it back. Red shoved him and Franklin fell backwards, hitting his head on the railing. Then Red was on top of him, punching him as Franklin kicked and cried underneath.
Bob Hood raced in and pulled the boys apart. I imagined the freckles on Red’s face stood out in bright blotches as he struggled free of Hood’s arms and ran out of the cabin. Hood hurried after him. The boys crowded around Franklin, who was rubbing his head and trying not to cry. When Bob Hood came back and asked if the boys knew where Red had gone, Hollis spoke up: ‘We’ll bring him back if you stay out of this.’ The boys drew in closer to stand behind Hollis.
The story is an awkward wrinkle in the smooth narrative of the experiment presented in The Robbers Cave Experiment: intergroup conflict and cooperation. But it’s stayed with OJ, and he tells the story with a kind of wonder at the boys’ solidarity. Clearly they had given up expecting the men to take Red in hand. I wondered if they had been inspired by Ida, who seemed the only one among the adults laying down any rules about right and wrong. Maybe it was Ida’s talk that gave them a burst of courage.
Hollis and Bill searched the camp and the woods and returned with Red an hour later. The boys adjourned to the mess hall with the rest of their group, with no adults allowed. The men only learned afterwards what happened.
‘They held a kangaroo court and kicked him out,’ OJ said. ‘Told him he couldn’t be part of the group until he apologised.’ But Red was stubborn. He returned to his hide-out in the bush.
Noon came and one of the smaller boys brought him a plate of food, ‘like a puppy’, OJ told me, and ‘[he] said, “All you’ve got to do is apologise and you can come back in,” but Red wasn’t having any of it. He spat at the boy’s feet and said nope, he was staying put, he wasn’t about to apologise.’ Red sulked alone all afternoon, but that night after supper, ‘he came limping into port and the boys made room for him at the table and continued with their card game. No one said anything. But he never bothered any of them again,’ OJ said admiringly, shaking his head. No wonder the men left this out of the published version of the experiment, I thought. How would they accommodate this in their story of the united and aggressive Rattlers?
After lunch, OJ told the boys to fill their water canteens because there seemed to be some problem with the water supply and he needed volunteers to help find the problem and fix it. So began the experiment’s final stage, where the men introduced superordinate goals or problems that the boys could only solve together, with the idea that this would restore relations between them. This time there had been no talk of setting a forest fire, I imagined because OJ was practical enough to realise it was a dangerous and unpredictable way to try to unite the boys.
In their groups, the boys, trying to find the problem, slowly traced the water line from the mess hall, up the mountain, to the water tank at the top, where that morning OJ and Sherif had buried the valve under a fall of rocks. Sherif made few notes on the day, busy following the boys up and down the line, pretending to be flummoxed by the problem and, like the boys, looking for a solution. At key moments, when the boys’ backs were turned, he took photos. The men had their hearts in their mouths, OJ told me, watching the boys move along the line, trying to find where and why the water had stopped flowing. ‘The whole idea was that they would have to work together to fix it,’ OJ said. ‘But we didn’t know if it was going to work. We were improvising.’
At the beginning ‘they were quite touchy about interacting’, but slowly, with the sun beating down and their water canteens slowly emptying, the boundaries between the groups began to blur. I pictured the Rattlers, free of the tension of Red’s bullying, were more relaxed than they had been for days, and the Eagles, anxious to put an end to the fighting, were ready to meet the others halfway.
When the boys finally found the valve buried under the rockslide at the top of the mountain, the groups took turns lifting and carrying the rocks away. But, realising there was a better and faster way of getting the job done, they soon formed a chain, passing the rocks down the line and working as a single team. In the photos you can see the boys standing on the ladder and clambering over the top of the water tank. I thought about how hot it was at Robbers Cave in July — how the metal from the water tank would radiate heat and would burn to the touch, the ground around it dry and dusty — but the boys clambered eagerly over the tank and stood peering up at it at different rungs on its metal ladder. They were clearly motivated, and pl
eased to be able to help.
By sundown, however, after three hours in the sun lifting and hauling rocks, the boys were exhausted. ‘We’d done too good a job on those rocks,’ OJ said with a laugh. ‘In the end we had to solve it. They needed our help, so we helped them lift off the final rocks.’ With the water supply restored, and as much cold mountain water to drink as the boys wanted, supper that evening was a relatively ‘calm’ affair. ‘There was some joking between the boys, although things were still a little strained. But it was the beginning of the breakdown of the antagonism.’
Despite the others’ tiredness, Sherif was full of energy. ‘He was elated,’ OJ said. ‘We both were. We could have pulled those rocks off single-handed we were so pleased.’ He laughed. ‘He was an egalitarian guy. He was against competition because it creates prejudice and inequality. Now we had created a situation where groups would work together and break it down.’
But it was just the beginning, the tentative first steps. ‘We didn’t get ahead of ourselves,’ OJ said. ‘We had to come up with other things to get eleven-year-old boys to cooperate. We were saying, “What on earth are we gonna do next?”’ You wouldn’t know it from the published description of the final week that it was the result of last-minute planning.’ The next day, the men announced that their budget didn’t cover the full cost of hiring the movie Treasure Island, so the groups pooled their money; the day after, they went camping together at a lake. ‘They got one tent up and they didn’t have time to put the second one up before a very severe storm came over, as if we’d ordered it,’ OJ recounted and chuckled. I imagine that sheltering in one tent for the night, with the excuse of the storm, allowed the boys a chance to make friends without loss of face.
The last event for the week was a trip to Arkansas. The boys were told there would be two trucks, with a group in each truck. All of them were excited at the prospect of crossing the border into another state. The Rattlers were so keen that they wanted to leave without breakfast. But that would have spoiled the men’s plan. After the boys had eaten, OJ announced solemnly that one of the trucks was out of action: ‘We only have one truck fit to take campers to Arkansas so we might have to give up on the idea of going.’ Over the boys’ cries of disappointment one boy yelled, ‘We can all go in one truck, OJ!’ and the others joined in. Sherif noted that a couple of boys were silent and seemed resistant to the idea, but they were swamped by the general enthusiasm. It would have been near impossible for OJ not to grin, or glance over at Sherif, who I pictured hovering by the door, wiping his hands on a rag as if he had been looking under the bonnet of a broken-down truck.