The Lost Boys

by Gina Perry

  ‘I never saw anything like it. That frog was the size of a saucer!’

  ‘We floated right up to it.’

  ‘Each snake with a hind leg in its mouth, and rest of snake strung back out on the water —’

  ‘That frog was trying to get loose. Awful noise, wasn’t it?’

  ‘And that counsellor drew a pistol.’

  Both men laughed.

  ‘It was exciting,’ Bill said.

  ‘Sure was,’ replied Smut.

  They were silent for a minute.

  ‘You think he shot that frog,’ Bill said, ‘or did he kill the snakes?’

  ‘Hard to tell,’ Smut said.

  They mulled it over a while, jiggling straws in their drinks. Had the man saved the frog or killed it? Was he villain or hero, friend or foe?

  ‘They studied us,’ Smut said. ‘What did they determine from their studies? What were they trying to find out?’

  It dawned on me why they might have been nervous about meeting. They sensed that the experiment had been a kind of test. But whether they had they passed or failed, and what the men had learned about them: that they didn’t know. When they looked to me to explain the experiment, I reiterated what they already knew, that it had been about how you could bring groups to war, and then bring them round to peace again. What I left out was that Sherif later defined it as a kind of moral test that the boys had failed.

  I felt sure this doubt about the experiment’s significance was at the heart of Bill’s uneasiness. Perhaps he hoped in meeting one of the other boys to find the answer, but it seemed to me that Smut was cautious too and might have been bothered by the same questions.

  Despite the final reconciliatory stage, where the boys merged into a single harmonious group, the Robbers Cave boys are famous for their supposed transformation, in Sherif’s words, from ‘cream of the crop’ to ‘disturbed, vicious … youngsters’. And if you read Sherif’s description of the experiment and the version repeated in psychology textbooks, you get the same story.

  But how was it that the boys at Robbers Cave turned on one another in this way? They were no less ‘normal’ than the boys from New York State. They were the same age, and while they were poorer and from down south, it seemed unlikely that socioeconomic background or geography explained the change.

  The hypothesis and design in 1954 were different: in Oklahoma, Sherif and his team had dispensed with any attempt to convert friends into enemies. The two groups had no chance to make friends before the competition started — even though the boys had tried, they’d been blocked from developing intergroup relationships. Jack White’s refusal to invite the other group into the birthday party got the tournament off to a hostile start. Unlike the year before, the norms of good sportsmanship soon dissolved, as at Robbers Cave both groups typecast their opponents as cheaters. The Eagles sat down during the tug of war, which was against the rules. The Rattlers trashed the Eagles’ cabin the night before cabin inspection to gain an edge in the competition.

  Was it also the behaviour of the researchers that was different this time round? I revisited the staff instructions and noticed Kelman’s original directives had been revised for the 1954 study and contained new ordinances. Once boys decided on a ‘line of action’, the book noted, staff could ‘give them help to carry it out’ and ‘give advice’. In contrast to the 1953 study, where staff were instructed to stay at arm’s length and not ‘influence’ the campers, this time staff could take a more active role. The boys were likely ‘to turn to you, as adults, for approval or sanction’, and as long as the boys’ actions ‘do not run counter to the criteria for a given stage’, staff were allowed to give the OK for them to go ahead. But exactly what behaviour the men could permit and encourage, and what they would forbid, the instructions didn’t say. So they had more leeway to shape the group’s behaviour in line with the experiment’s hypotheses and to move things along. Remembering how much pressure OJ said they were under, I wasn’t really surprised. There’d been a few instances when I was going through the materials where it seemed to me that staff were clearly crossing a line, but I could see now that they were within the rubbery boundaries of the directions they’d been given.

  A year earlier, Jim Carper had made a habit of ensuring the whole group voted and came to a unanimous decision on any action they wanted to take, but there’s no mention of this process at Robbers Cave. So just exactly how many boys had to suggest flag burning before staff ‘gave a hand’? I thought of the matches that mysteriously appeared when the Eagles boys stood around the Rattlers’ flag, and how, if following these instructions, it would have been acceptable for the men to help them set the flag alight.

  So where exactly did the line between staff intervention begin and end? Surely the men’s involvement in and approval of retaliation and vandalism had influenced the boys’ behaviour? Bob Hood not only didn’t reprimand his Rattler group for trashing property but also accompanied them on the night raid and took photos. The men blocked behaviour that might run counter to their hypotheses too: after the first raid, the Eagles suggested a peaceful resolution to Jack White, asking for the Rattler group to be disqualified from the tournament, but White suggested they sabotage the Rattlers to even the score.

  How much of the groups’ ‘initiative’ originated with the boys and how much with the men? Whose idea was the night raid, the smearing of their faces with soot ‘commando style’? How long did Bob Hood and Jack White use the excuse of a bet with each other to motivate their groups to win? The observation notes weren’t nearly as informative as a source for me this time round. They were much shorter, and fulfilled a different function too. Instead of trying not to pay selective attention, as Herbert Kelman had urged in the earlier study, this time the men were urged to do the opposite: ‘The ongoing activities will present the possibility of an infinite number of events that could be observed and recorded. Therefore, please have the hypotheses for the given stage focal in your mind so that observations will not be hodgepodge but will be relevant to the hypotheses in question …’

  One of Sherif’s major predictions, and the one that has made Robbers Cave famous, is the apparently spontaneous mistrust and hostility that erupted between the groups during the tournament, and the apparent inevitability of the fighting that broke out when the Eagles group won the prize. But rather than competition causing conflict at Robbers Cave, it was the intervention of the men setting the groups against one another that added fuel to the fire. The year before, Kelman objected to these ‘frustration situations’ organised by the staff to increase hostility between the boys, calling them ‘a serious violation’ of the experimental design. In the 1953 study, the staff, playing agent provocateurs, created incidents so that one group of boys would mistakenly attribute it as an attack from the other boys. Their interventions had been relatively benign — mixing up clothing, cutting a flagpole rope — but neither group took the bait. At Robbers Cave, Sherif and his team upped the ante. But the hostility between the boys couldn’t be explained as a byproduct of the competition; it was because they felt under attack. They fought one another not because one group won the tournament but because they had been violated, their flags burned, their huts raided, their prizes stolen.

  It seemed to me that what happened at Robbers Cave wasn’t a test of a theory so much as a choreographed enactment, with the boys as the unwitting actors in someone else’s script.

  The men had encouraged hostility and fighting. Now I thought I could see why OJ would so vividly remember the ‘kangaroo court’ and why it was not included in the final report on the experiment. I thought I understood why some of the Rattler boys, such as Bill and Hollis, had kept the men away when they wanted to take Red in hand. The men had never stepped in to protect boys in either group from Red’s bullying and aggression. If anything, they rewarded him for it. It seemed no coincidence to me that the afternoon these boys banished Red and stripped him of
his power was the same in which the two groups made tentative steps towards friendship. Sherif might have put it down to the power of a superordinate goal, but I read it as the boys restoring rules that the men had broken.

  When I tried to pin OJ down on just how much of a role the men played in generating friction between boys, he said, ‘I might be biased, but I think the Robbers Cave study was clean. We introduced manipulations and then we stepped aside.’ But this bothered me. How could they both manipulate and step aside?

  ‘What we told them was they’d have to do things safely. We made it very clear that they could essentially do what they wanted as long as no one got hurt.’

  I thought how frightening that idea must have been to some of the children. They were in a remote rural wilderness with men who intimated there were few holds barred and where the values of home and church and school had no force. Respect and fairness were discouraged. Cursing, bullying, cheating, and fighting were rewarded. And in the notes of The Robbers Cave Experiment, the boys’ misery and resentment spills across the pages.

  There was a kind of naivety at work here in OJ’s response that surprised me. In an experiment about group influence and inequities in power, the men seemed blind to their own role as a powerful group in the camp. On one hand, they acknowledged how they engineered events and set up misinformation so that one group would get angry with the other and retaliate. But they couldn’t, or wouldn’t, see that their non-intervention was in itself an action that sent a powerful message to the children. The fact that they did nothing to prevent or put a stop to the name-calling and the cursing, the food throwing, the vandalism, and the raids communicated their approval and encouragement. How could they state that they had manipulated the boys’ interactions at the same time as arguing that the boys’ behaviour was ‘natural’? I was surprised, too, that someone like OJ could be so insightful in some ways but not have reflected on this.

  Sherif used the term ‘hypothesis’ in his descriptions of what he planned for this research, but I was struck in reading his research proposals and outlines that there was nothing tentative about his predictions. The book that resulted from the 1954 Robbers Cave study describes a surprisingly neat scenario that proceeds smoothly through each stage, in vivid contrast to the Middle Grove study the year before:

  … in testing our main hypotheses, we supplemented the observational method with sociometric and laboratory-like methods. One distinctive feature of this study was introducing, at choice points, laboratory-like techniques to assess emerging attitudes through indirect, yet precise indices. Such laboratory-like assessment of attitudes is based on the finding that under relevant conditions, simple judgments or perceptions reflect major concerns, attitudes and other motives of man.

  Despite the often dry and scientific language of passages like this in their book and an emphasis on careful testing, Sherif’s study was not an experiment in the sense of an investigation, a gathering of evidence or proof. Sherif’s theory, already elaborated and developed, was the road map. The job of the research staff was to follow it.

  So Sherif had a clear idea from the outset of what would happen, I asked OJ. ‘Oh, he had a definite script in mind, all right. His mind was not open. It was most definitely made up. And it was me who looked after the logistics, who made it happen.’ I was taken aback by how matter of fact and unapologetic he was about it. As if there was no question that this was the job of the research team, to deliver on the scenario they had already envisaged, like stagehands to a director.

  I remembered the first time I came across a groundbreaking paper on the ethics of psychological research, when I was researching my book about Stanley Milgram. The paper was written by a professor called Herbert Kelman, and titled ‘Human Use of Human Subjects: the problem of deception in social psychological experiments’. Published in 1967, it was an in-depth discussion of what psychologists should and shouldn’t do in the name of social psychological research with human subjects. Before then, published discussion of the ethics of deceiving people about the purposes of an experiment was rare, and Kelman’s paper was a watershed moment.

  I read the paper in preparation for my interview with him in Boston in 2013. Part of the text reads, ‘There is something disturbing about the idea of relying on massive deception as the basis for developing a field of inquiry’ as it ‘establishes the reputation of psychologists as people who cannot be believed’. So when I met Herb Kelman, I was eager to find out if this influential paper was inspired by his experience working on Sherif’s summer-camp experiment.

  ‘I’d never made that connection,’ he said with surprise. ‘If I was still in therapy now, that’s something I’d take to my therapist. I’ve written a lot about ethics of experimentation, but this study never figured in my thinking — you’ve just opened up a question for me. I really do think now that you raise it that there are serious ethical questions about it — there’s a difference between deceiving them in the course of a one-hour experiment and deceiving them about a three-week experience. I think you’re absolutely right. I’m sorry I’m not in analysis right now; I’d take it up with my analyst: How come this hasn’t figured?’

  Perhaps it didn’t matter that he hadn’t made the connection consciously; his paper fanned a public debate about ethics that would change the way psychological research was conducted. After talking to OJ Harvey about both experiments it seemed to me that he and Sherif did not consider the ethical implications of their studies. They considered the boys’ physical safety — the risk of snakes, bug bites, black eyes — at the same time that the observation notes showed that there was evidence of the boys’ emotional turmoil, the boys’ crying, praying, and bullying. How could they notice such behaviour and not worry about its effects?

  There was a kind of double vision at work here. To his professional peers, Sherif described the study as about nations, states, hostility, and conflict. But to anyone concerned about the ethics of the research, Sherif argued that the hostility between the boys was little more than schoolboy rivalry:

  The competitive situation consists of games which boys enjoy playing. The enthusiasm in the activity and in opposition to the out-group in our work has been by no means more, and probably less, than can be observed on any street corner or school between rival cliques or school teams composed of normal healthy boys. For example, here in Norman the football game between McKinley and Lincoln gradeschools engenders greater excitement than the situations I specified in my experimental outline …

  This denial of the boys’ experience extended beyond the study. OJ told me that Bob Hood regularly talked about the experiment in his teaching at the University of Oklahoma. After one of his psychology classes in the 1960s, a student approached Hood to say that he was one of the subjects. But Hood brushed him off and told him he was mistaken.

  In the lobby of the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City is a huge white sculpture of a Native American slumped over his horse, his lance hanging uselessly from his hand. Both man and horse look defeated and on the brink of death. The plaque reads ‘The End of the Trail’, and I was contemplating why this sculpture of a dying American Indian was given such a prominent place in the museum when my phone rang.

  I’d left a message for him three weeks earlier, but Dwayne hadn’t called me back. All I knew about him was he worked for a company that makes medical devices and that he sounded businesslike and rather brisk. I was pleased to hear from him, and the last thing I was going to do was tell him that now wasn’t the best time. I took my phone outside and sat on a chair at the edge of the museum café, away from a table of grey-haired tourists in glowing white sneakers. Since we last spoke, he had started reading the book about the experiment and had waited till he finished it before he rang me back.

  I felt a clutch of anxiety to hear that Dwayne had read the book, and I realised how protective I was beginning to feel about these adult men. I’d worried about what it mig
ht feel like to recognise yourself in The Robbers Cave Experiments, how it could be upsetting to learn you could say or do things that you didn’t know you had in you. It was one of the reasons I had been reluctant to recommend the book to those men I spoke to. It was written to emphasise the way the staff simply stood back and let things take their course, and in reading it, one could easily believe that the boys weren’t manipulated.

  But not Dwayne. ‘They were out to prove a point, weren’t they? It didn’t seem very scientific to me. I mean, what did they prove — that you can set things up so people will argue and fight? That’s news?’ There was an edge of impatience in his voice.

  ‘You encouraged the others in your group to pray before games,’ I said.

  ‘I bet I did,’ he said dryly.

  ‘You’re not still —?’

  ‘No!’ he laughed. ‘That was my parents’ influence. I grew up going to church, but I gave it up in my teens. I was a “troubled teen”.’ He put emphasis on the phrase. ‘I gave my parents a terrible time — stopped going to church, got in with a gang. For a while I even dropped out of school.’ As if he’d read my mind, he said, ‘I’d love to blame it on this camp, and who knows, you know, maybe all that fighting they had us involved in did something. I don’t really believe that, but it’s always been a bit of a mystery to me: where did I get the idea — this mild little goofy kid — where did I get the idea just a couple of years later that it was okay to solve problems with my fists? Don’t think I haven’t thought of it since all this came up.’

  He said something else, but there was a burst of laughter from the tourist table and I missed it. ‘Sorry, could you repeat that?’

  ‘They thought they were doing the right thing, my folks,’ he said, clearing his throat. ‘They were eager to send me. They thought it would be good for me, you know.’ There was real sorrow in his voice. ‘I guess I learned to stand up for myself, that not everybody plays fair.’