Robbers Cave Experiment

An area of interest to both sociologists and psychologists alike is the study of groups. How do groups form? How do they interact with other groups, and why? Drawing particular attention is the question of how conflicts develop between groups. One attempt to understand this dynamic is Donald Campbell’s Realistic Conflict Theory, which accounts for group conflict, negative prejudices, and stereotypes as the result of competition between groups for limited resources. This theory was validated by Muzafer Sherif’s Robbers Cave Experiment in the early 1960s, which observed 22 eleven-year-old boys to study how prejudice and conflict develop between groups of people.

In this field experiment, 22 boys, all aged eleven, white, of middle-class socioeconomic status, and from Protestant backgrounds, were taken to a 200-acre Boy Scouts of America summer camp in Robbers Cave State Park in Oklahoma, America. The children were unaware that they were being observed as subjects of an experiment, thinking they were simply going for summer camp. Prior to departure, the boys were randomly divided into two groups, with eleven boys in each group.

The first phase of the experiment was the “in-group formation phase.” Each group was transported separately to the park and housed in a cabin. For the first week, each group was unaware of the existence of the other. It was a time of group bonding through activities such as hiking and swimming, as well as by pursuing common goals that required co-operative discussion, planning, and execution. As a result, the boys quickly attached to the other members of their groups. Each group chose a name that they stencilled onto shirts and flags. One group was the Eagles, and the other the Rattlers. 

The experiment then moved into the second phase, called the “friction phase,” which began with the two groups finding out about each other’s presence. Almost immediately, signs of intergroup conflict emerged in the form of name-calling. Then the experimenters escalated the conflict by pitting the groups against each other in a series of orchestrated competitions including baseball and tug-of-war. At the end of the competitions the scores were tallied, and the Rattlers won the overall trophy. Predictably, this significantly increased the antagonism between the groups. The Rattlers claimed rights over the baseball field by planting their flag in it, even putting up a sign saying “Keep Off.” Verbal abuses and threats, some in the form of derogatory songs, were exchanged. Over a period of about four days, the conflict escalated to the burning of the Rattlers’ flag and the ransacking of the Eagles’ cabin. By the end of this phase, the groups were refusing to eat in the same room together.

With the conflict firmly entrenched, the experiment moved into the “integration phase.” This third and final phase had the goal of getting the groups to resolve their conflicts. The first attempt to facilitate this had the groups brought together for common activities such as watching films and shooting firecrackers. However, neither of these options resulted in decreases in conflict or increases in integration or prosocial behaviour. The next approach involved taking the two groups to a new location and giving them a common problem to solve. The boys were told that there was a drinking water shortage due to an attack by vandals. This pitted the two groups against the perceived external threat and presented them with the common goal of restoring the drinking water system to full function. The groups jointly problem-solved to unblock the faucet with relative ease. Afterwards, the two groups were made to join resources to pay for a movie that they jointly decided on, and by the evening of that day, the groups were eating together once again.

If you were to look solely at the results of this experiment, you would likely conclude, along with Sherif and many other researchers, that groups naturally develop their own cultures, status structures, and boundaries, but that these differences were reconcilable through joint problem solving of subordinate goals. But what most people don’t know about Sherif’s experiment is that it was the third in a series, and that the two earlier experiments presented less optimistic findings. In the first one, the boys ganged up on a common enemy, and in the second, they rebelled against the experimenters themselves.

The result of the second experiment reveals an important element of the studies that mustn’t be taken for granted, which is that there weren’t two groups, but three. As Michael Billig pointed out in 1976, the experimenters orchestrated most of the conflict between the groups, making the experimenters the third and most powerful group. Thus, he argues, the combination of the three experiments are more indicative of the possible outcomes of a powerful group trying to manipulate two weaker groups than of the normative interactions of two groups of equal power.

Thus, the overall conclusion of the studies was that unequal power between groups fundamentally changes the dynamics between them. The outcomes vary, and are largely dependent on the actions of the group in power. These experiments offer a microcosmic view into group relations of inequality that we see in macro levels of society when countries, corporations, families, or other typical social groups or institutions hold power over others.