by Gina Perry
If you’re lucky, you come across a teacher in your life who changes everything. A door swings open, a previously dark room is filled with light, and beyond the doorway a whole vivid world springs to life. OJ Harvey felt this way in his first class with Muzafer Sherif at the University of Oklahoma. Until then, psychology for twenty-four-year-old Harvey had been ‘a puny little science’— simple, dull, and myopic in its focus on laboratory life. But Sherif’s psychology incorporated notions from history, anthropology, and sociology. For Harvey, it was a whole new world.
The two men hit it off, largely, Harvey believes, because he corrected Sherif during a class — something his classmates were too afraid to do. Soon Harvey was Sherif’s teaching assistant, then his right-hand man. Sherif was highly dependent on the practical people in his life. Carolyn ran the household, wrote the family letters, took care of the children, answered calls for Sherif, helped to draft and refine book chapters and papers, paid the bills, and smoothed ruffled feathers. At the university, Harvey played a similar role. Sherif’s reputation for unpredictability meant that colleagues and students didn’t know what sort of reception they’d get when they requested a meeting with him or asked for a response to an administrative request — whether they’d be greeted by the cordial and charming professor or his intimidating alter-ego, who was overbearing and argumentative. So they went to Harvey instead. Harvey was well known for his organisational skills — he told me his friends said he could ‘organise a bucket of worms’ — and his diplomacy.
They made a strange pair. On one side was the Turkish professor with a relatively privileged upbringing and clear sense of entitlement. On the other was the son of a sharecropper who had saved for college from the age of ten by fattening up and selling orphaned calves. But his students’ achievements were Sherif’s achievements, and he encouraged pupils like Harvey to aim for the Ivy League.
Few knew Harvey’s secret to gaining Sherif’s respect. In 1950, soon after he started working for Sherif, the two had a run-in over an administrative mix-up. Sherif shouted at Harvey and, among other things, called him an idiot. Harvey told Sherif, ‘Screw you! Nobody talks to me like that!’ and quit. After a week, Sherif sought Harvey out, hugged him, and cried. Harvey said that Sherif trusted him after that, and treated him like an equal, including him in seminars and conferences where he was the only student among leading scholars in the field.
Sherif expected his graduate students to work as hard as he did, and those that didn’t soon fell by the wayside. His evening seminars, scheduled to finish at 9.00 pm, frequently continued well into the night, usually at the bar. If a student missed a class, he would go looking for them afterwards to publicly remonstrate with them about their absence. Some found his compulsive drive and single-mindedness repellent; others found it compelling. But social psychology was his life, and he expected his students to take it as seriously as he did. OJ Harvey shared his zeal, and it was this shared passion that allowed the two men to work so closely together on what became one of the most imaginative social psychology experiments of its time.
By May 1953, Sherif’s troubles seemed to be over. After two years of intense lobbying by Carolyn, and with the help of an immigration lawyer, his deportation had been averted. Despite Cantril’s damning testimony against Sherif, the FBI found no proof and closed the case against him. And while his position at the University of Oklahoma was untenured and dependent on the amount of research funding he could bring into the university, the funding for a more ambitious group experiment, at $38,000, was huge — equivalent to seven years of Sherif’s salary.
Carolyn did her best to help him choose the right staff. For this 1953 study — the Middle Grove study — Sherif chose people such as OJ Harvey and Marvin Sussman, who shared his work ethic and would be grateful for the opportunity to work with him. But Sherif seemed unable to shake a feeling of dread and foreboding. Did he sense early on that this major study would end in disaster? Or that he would have to salvage what he could of his theory and his reputation in an unplanned and desperate final experiment down in Oklahoma a year later? His fear of failure haunted him. Unfortunately for Sherif, he was unable to take the one person who was his greatest asset to this major study with him. Carolyn, with her knack for anticipating and resolving problems and her ability to keep Sherif in line, would be staying behind to take care of their daughters, aged six and three. That would turn out to be his biggest mistake.
14
The Museum of Innocence
In 1975, Muzafer Sherif wrote to OJ Harvey out of the blue. They had been largely out of touch for a number of years, beyond exchanging occasional cards at Christmas. But in 1975 Sherif, in an apparently buoyant frame of mind, wrote saying how ‘terribly good’ he felt about the Robbers Cave experiment and how ‘rejuvenated’ he was when he thought about it:
The more I think about it … the more I realize how much [the experiment] owes to you. Without your utmost participation, your resourcefulness, sound judgments and down to earth arrangements it couldn’t possibly be carried through to its culmination. I just wanted to convey to you this strong feeling and my gratitude to you.
It was the first time that Sherif had acknowledged this to Harvey, although in 1967, at a talk at the University of North Dakota, he described the Robbers Cave study as ‘the crowning one, done where the best things are done, in Oklahoma by Indians’.
It was a rare time — perhaps the only time in Sherif’s professional life when he ceded control. OJ thinks that Sherif wanted someone to place limits on him. ‘You would have thought that after the 1953 study, when I threatened him with the block of wood, that there’d be problems.’ OJ laughed and shook his head. ‘But he seemed to want someone to take charge.’
Listening to OJ’s account of how hard they worked at Robbers Cave and how it took weeks for him to get back into the habit of sleeping more than four hours a night, I got a glimpse of Sherif’s drive and his ability to inspire those around him: ‘All of us went for broke, we were so committed.’ Sherif and OJ had a particular bond. ‘It was a heart-and-soul thing for both of us. We put everything into it,’ OJ said. I recalled how OJ had once told me that he and Sherif would have thrown themselves off a cliff if the study failed.
I was still surprised by how open OJ was in admitting that Sherif knew exactly what he wanted to prove at Robbers Cave and why it had been so important to have things worked out in advance. ‘We knew that that kind of thing happened, and we just reproduced it. Looking back, I don’t think we did find anything that was not known about groups and harmony and tension,’ OJ said. He saw it as his job to engineer the unfolding of Sherif’s theory in the landscape at Robbers Cave. This emphasis on confirmation rather than investigation had always intrigued me, right since I first began to research the experiment, and it wasn’t until I did some more reading that I understood this was a tradition from Kurt Lewin: to use experiments as a way of showing ‘the way things work in the real world’, where your research was a confirmation of what you already intuitively knew.
On one hand, it was a refreshing contrast to the often gimmicky kind of laboratory-based social psychological research of the era that valued counterintuitive and surprising results. On the other hand, acting out a theory at Robbers Cave State Park and looking for confirmation of truth allowed for a casual cruelty towards the subjects in the study.
This apparent dichotomy that many social psychologists of the period seemed to share, between altruism and deep concern for humankind and an apparent lack of concern for the psychological wellbeing of their subjects, made sense to me now. I didn’t agree with it, but I could see how Sherif and OJ could hold two such contradictory views at once. I understood now how Sherif was able to deny that there were any ethical problems with his research. After all, he saw social relationships as ‘messy, contradictory and fraught with conflict, suffering and agony’, and his responsibility as a kind of social engineer, intent on rectifying injust
ice and improving the world. The discomfort of a group of eleven-year-old boys was a small price to pay for research that could alleviate any of that torment. It explained why both Sherif and Carolyn saw social psychology as a vocation rather than just a career. And while they were forced to downplay this during the McCarthy years, their brand of idealism never left them.
OJ didn’t agree with Sherif’s conclusion that you could overcome conflict as easily as Sherif’s experiment appeared to demonstrate. But he never confided this in Sherif. ‘Afterwards, he wrote and told me it was the most important thing he ever did. It defined him. He said it was the biggest thing in his life. So I kept my opinions to myself.’
I could see what OJ meant. It might have been easy to manipulate a peaceful resolution at Robbers Cave with groups of children, but how could you bring about a similar result in the broader world, when the gap between the haves and the have-nots was as wide as it had ever been, and the discrimination was systemic? But if you raised these kinds of questions with Sherif, OJ said, he shut the discussion down. There was no surer way of bringing an end to Sherif’s evening seminars than by pointing out the degree of control the men had over the boys and asking how one could manipulate warring classes or nations into peace. And even if one could, OJ said, he didn’t believe those kinds of alliances lasted.
I thought of the optimism of the ruling elite in Turkey in the early years of the Republic, when the new Turkishness was supposed to be the glue that bound new citizens together, and how in contemporary times it has come unstuck with the rise of conservative Islamist politics and the autocratic dictatorship of Erdoğan. Would Sherif have predicted the swamping of the engineered secular and modern identity, and the values of the Old World rushing in to take its place?
OJ understood that Sherif had an investment in the outcome of the experiment that went beyond scientific reputation, and that he was in some grand way trying to right a wrong. But OJ knew very little about Sherif’s background in Turkey. And he never asked. ‘It was one of those things. I had the greatest respect for him, but I felt I needed to keep him at a distance.’
Sherif’s daughters had also told me how little information their father had volunteered about Turkey, how they had to coax it out of him. And I wondered about the burden of carrying traumatic experiences. Visiting Turkey, I became acutely aware of the silences that must have haunted people who lived through those early years of the Republic.
Turkish historian Leyla Neyzi has described how fear has inhibited many older Turkish people from passing on oral histories to the next generation, especially when their personal stories differ from the official version. In one interview with a ninety-four-year-old woman in Izmir, who had lived there since childhood, Neyzi noticed the silences in the woman’s narrative:
[i]t has no doubt to do with the widespread violence between Christians and Muslims and the bloodletting that occurred at the end of Turkey’s ‘War of Independence’ that made the Turks, first victims, then perpetrators, to want to forget their suffering, and subsequently their guilt, for what they made others suffer. It is, in a nutshell, the story of modern Turkey — and remains so. Unfortunately, today’s internecine violence between Turks and Kurds is a repeat performance in contemporary disguise.
Victim, perpetrator, enemy, friend. I could see how pain and guilt could drive a kind of collective amnesia, or an unofficial silence.
Yet Sertan Batur, a Turkish scholar and expert on Sherif I met in Vienna, doesn’t believe that the camp studies accurately reflected the conflicts of Sherif’s Turkish childhood. ‘It was very idealistic,’ Sertan said. ‘But it wasn’t realistic.’ He is dark-eyed and rather serious, and when we met, he greeted me by putting a hand over his heart. We were in the wood-panelled Café Hawelka, in Vienna’s Jewish quarter.
The Robbers Cave experimental design wasn’t much like the Turkey Sherif grew up in, Sertan went on. ‘He said he was affected by the conflicts between the Turks and the Greeks. But his research didn’t capture the inequalities in power relations between the Greeks and the Turks, or the history between them.’
After all, Sherif’s boys had been chosen for their homogeneity. They shared the same skin colour, ethnic background, language, culture, and religion. As such, Sherif’s theory of the resolution of group conflict was of little use in Turkey, then or now, Sertan said. ‘It doesn’t answer problems of conflict between people of different races, ethnicity, or culture, and he did not address the issue of power imbalances between groups.’ While Sertan, who works with migrant families in Vienna, admires Sherif, he said Sherif’s theory ‘doesn’t explain big social issues. He cannot explain society for me.’
‘I think he wanted to find something optimistic in the climate of the Cold War — I think he wanted to produce something politically useful so his research said something powerful and inspiring for the oppressed. He could say, “I have discovered something that will stop people hurting each other. If we focus on bigger issues, things that are important to all of us, we can overcome these problems between us.” The political implications were more important than the research techniques and methods. I think he ignored his results from the early experiment and censored his own research and emphasised the optimistic rather than the realistic results.’
Perhaps Sertan was right: the Robbers Cave experiment was a Cold War bedtime story to give people hope in a time of fear — or a narrative that Sherif told himself to increase his faith in humanity and feel that he was making a valuable contribution to the future of the world. But it felt deeper than that to me.
In 1954, with the successful completion of the Robbers Cave study, the tight-knit research team dissolved. Within months, Jack White had moved to the University of Utah, in Salt Lake City, and OJ Harvey was on his way to the University of Colorado, in Boulder, via Yale. Only Bob Hood was left, and his dissertation was almost finished.
With Harvey gone, Hood became the focus of Sherif’s affection. Sherif was possessive and proud of the achievements of his graduate students, but particularly OJ Harvey, who was part Choctaw; Jack White, who was Kiowa; and Bob Hood, who was Cherokee. Hood jokingly called Sherif’s habit of bragging to his Ivy League colleagues about what he could do with poor boys down south as his Pygmalion complex, even though Hood’s family owned a string of pharmacies in Oklahoma.
Sherif was reluctant to let Hood go. Whenever Hood tried to arrange his final oral examination, Sherif would put him off. The story goes that Sherif was so reluctant to see him leave that Hood, who had a reputation as an unconventional thinker, had to take extreme measures to gain his independence. He rang Sherif in his office one morning and said, ‘I’ll be on the bleachers at Owen Field at three this afternoon, and I want you to be there.’ When Sherif showed up, Hood pulled out a Colt .45 and put it down on the seat between them and said, ‘I want to finish my dissertation.’ Sherif nodded and said, ‘Okay, Bob,’ before getting up and walking away. Hood graduated soon after. I laughed when I heard this story — it seems almost certainly apocryphal — but it has a disturbing edge.
With Harvey already at Yale and White making preparations to leave, the men worked quickly to write a book about the experiment. Carolyn, at home with the children during the Robbers Cave camp, had prepared what she could of the manuscript ready for the others to add the missing pieces.
But OJ was never proud of it. ‘We wrote it in a hurry. And it shows,’ he told me. Six weeks after the experiment was over, a photocopied report, bound in a pale blue cardboard cover and titled Intergroup Conflict and Cooperation, was produced in the University of Oklahoma’s print room. Sherif immediately sent one hundred copies out to colleagues in psychology and sociology departments across the country, and signed a contract with Doubleday to publish it as a book entitled Friendship and Friction Between Groups.
Yet after Sherif sent the manuscript to Doubleday editor Josephine Lees, she wrote to him in February 1955, ‘We feel that the manuscript you have
presented to us is, frankly, not ready for publication in its present form.’ It was clear that the chapters had been written by different authors, and at different times. ‘As a result, the work does not hang together,’ she noted. She rejected the photos as not being of suitable reproduction quality and pointed out that if they were to publish any photos of the boys, Sherif would have to ‘obtain written permission from the parents to do so’.
The letter was like a red rag to a bull. Sherif reacted by putting his foot down, refusing to make any changes. Doubleday cancelled the contract.
The University of Oklahoma had established an Institute of Group Relations, headed up by Sherif, in 1955, and he felt very much at home there. But by 1958, he still had not been offered tenure, despite being there almost ten years, and the university’s strict anti-nepotism rules made it difficult for Carolyn to find ongoing work. In 1958 and 1959, he took leave to go to Texas with Carolyn, where she completed her PhD. It was unusual at the time for a father to be the primary parent involved in childcare, but Sherif’s daughter Sue remembers it as a happy period, with Muzafer spending the summers taking his three daughters to swimming pools and the cinema, where they went to repeated showings of the Marilyn Monroe vehicle Some Like It Hot.
In 1960, the University of Oklahoma was considering offering Sherif the post of research professor, and the dean of the graduate college, Lloyd Swearingen, wrote to Gordon Allport: ‘In your opinion has he made truly outstanding research contributions in the field? Is he truly outstanding among the men of his field in the United States?’ If Allport could give them a ‘frank and sincere answer’, it would be held in the ‘strictest confidence’.