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Forgotten Classic: The Robbers Cave Experiment Intergroup Conflict and Cooperation: The Robbers Cave Experiment by Muzafer Sherif; O. J. Harvey; B. Jack White; William R. Hood; Carolyn W. Sherif Review by: Gary Alan Fine Sociological Forum, Vol. 19, No. 4 (Dec., 2004), pp. 663-666 Published by: Springer Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4148836 Accessed: 30/09/2012 15:38

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Sociological Forum, Vol. 19, No. 4, December 2004 (C 2004) DOI: 10.1007/s11206-004-0704-7

Forgotten Classic: The Robbers Cave Experiment

Gary Alan Fine1

Intergroup Conflict and Cooperation: The Robbers Cave Experiment. Muzafer Sherif O. J. Harvey, B. Jack White, William R. Hood, and Carolyn W Sherif Norman: University of Oklahoma Book Exchange, 1961. Reprint edition, Wesleyan University Press, 1988.

What has become of the small group? Although the group itself has by no means vanished (Harrington and Fine, 2000), the idea of the group has decayed since its prominence in the heyday of group dynamics research dur- ing the 1950s. A half century has passed, and social scientists have embraced networks, global systems, and cognitive structures. Yet, a social science that is intent on exploring the meaning, the potential, and the power of social interaction has nowhere to turn but to the group, or so it would seem.

Some classic works are known more than read-blame the reader, the writer, or the access of the text. It is this last that is potentially the easi- est to correct. And so it is with the masterpiece of Muzafer Sherif (and his colleagues), Intergroup Conflict and Cooperation: The Robbers Cave Ex- periment. What is arguably the most significant book in social psychology was published as a printed typescript through a university bookstore: the University of Oklahoma Book Exchange and then reprinted by Wesleyan University Press. Despite its methodological innovations, theoretical signif- icance, and the fame of the lead author, this project is infrequently read. Muzafer Sherif's classic work, best known as the "Robbers Cave experi- ment" has become a forgotten monograph within a forgotten specialty.

In 1954 Sherif and his colleagues at the University of Oklahoma selected a group of 20 boys, divided them in two groups (the Eagles and the Rattlers), bussed them to a state park, and watched for 3 weeks as group structures developed, as group idiocultures were created. Eventually the Eagles and the

1Department of Sociology, Northwestern University, 1810 Chicago Avenue, Evanston, Illinois 60208; e-mail: [email protected].

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0884-8971/04/1200-0663/0 ? 2004 Springer Science+Business Media, Inc.

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Rattlers entered into conflict, and then, through a set of nifty experimental interventions overcame their hostility through solving tasks together.

It was Sherif's contention, based on a series of elaborate research studies in the late 1940s and early 1950s, that groups naturally develop status struc- tures and group cultures, and then establish boundaries, providing for the opportunity of intergroup conflict, particularly where resources need to be shared. The question-for both theory and policy-is how to overcome this

intergroup hostility. Sherif believed that the egocentric orientation of group members could be overcome if the rival groups were involved in achieving superordinate goals-goals that neither group by itself had the resources to achieve. While it might be an overstatement to suggest that such a claim had any direct bearing on firmly sedimented intergroup prejudice, much less on international relations, the idea that groups sometimes require others for the desired ends is surely accurate and behaviors may alter as a consequence. Sherif's point is valid in its focus on how groups defined their boundaries, and its assertion that this definition results from group goals and resources.

As much as for the substance of its findings, the Robbers Cave study is notable for its methodology. Muzafer Sherif (1906-1988), received his PhD in psychology at Columbia University. He taught both psychology (at the

University of Oklahoma) and sociology (at Pennsylvania State University), and during his academic career authored two dozen books. Sherif insisted that the understanding of the dynamics of group life was not (only) to be found in the laboratory. Early in his career, Sherif became known for his research on what is labeled the autokinetic effect. This refers to the physi- ological process by which, when an individual views a point of light within a darkened room, that point of light appears to move as a function of the natural and uncontrolled movement of one's eyes. This, in itself, is not a socio- logical phenomenon. Sherif's concern was to explain the social construction of norms. By bringing groups of individuals into the darkened room and have them estimate publicly the movement of the light, Sherif discovered that individual groups created their own norms for movement-their own culture that affected how members perceived the world.

These laboratory experiments provided a thin basis on which to examine the creation of group standards. Examining the dynamics of preadolescent group formation provides the richness of detail from which cultural dynamics is evident. Sherif's approach countered the standard methodological mod- els of controlled laboratory research that characterized experimental social

psychology then and now. Even though the Robbers Cave study is funda-

mentally grounded on ethnographic data, its structure is also based on the rigorous testing of hypotheses (Fine and Elsbach, 2000). Sherif and his col-

leagues present a set of experimental hypotheses which they proceed to evaluate, sometimes through observation over time and sometimes as the

Forgotten Classic: The Robbers Cave Experiment 665

result of providing the preadolescents with challenges, such as a "broken truck," which could not be pushed without the aid of all the boys, or a break in the water supply to the camp, which could not be fixed without the effort of both groups. As with any approach that represents a blend, one must determine whether one has achieved the best of two worlds or the worst. The inexactitude, manipulation, systematic control, and richness abut each other, and each reader is forced to weigh the benefits and weaknesses of a

study that is, at the least, an innovative blend of qualitative and quantitative analysis. For experimental methods, the fact that one is watching subjects ac- tually interact with one other in real time and in a naturalistic environment carries power.

It is a great triumph of the Robbers Cave experiment to remind us force- fully that groups really do count. No matter how exquisite an experimental manipulation, we are not merely watching individuals who have become convinced through a set of experimental manipulations that they are in the same scene with others, but are observing those who know that their ties are continuing and are consequential. This is interaction with all its rawness and

humor--and when one is dealing with preadolescent boys there is plenty of each.

So, Sherif and his colleagues have created a monograph that stands proudly as a description of the life of preadolescents, as a field experiment of

group dynamics, and as a claim for social policy. We are left with the question that, given this significance, why was the work not embraced by a major pub- lisher. Putting aside choices of the authors(choices of which I am unaware), perhaps the answer is tied to a set of historical particulars-the fact that much social psychological work is not published in book form, the fact that the Uni-

versity of Oklahoma was on the academic periphery, or perhaps the fact that the interdisciplinarity of the book separated it from the scholarly memory of any one community. Perhaps what happened to the memory of Intergroup Conflict and Cooperation is akin to what happened to the examination of the small group generally. The small group, after all, represents society writ small. Small groups are too large for the study of the individual within the domain of the "cognitive revolution," dismissing metaphors of the mind as a

computer; they are too small to be included in the growth in organizational and network analysis, rising with the expansion of schools of management. Methodologically, the small group demands intense observation-whether systematic, as in the categorical coding tradition of Bales and his colleagues, or ethnographic, as in the insightful fieldwork traditions of Sherif, Whyte, and

Festinger. For such a tiny public, so much effort. Today, the group seems para- doxically both too large and too small. The methodology of group dynamics, a cross of ethnography and experimentation, seems both too sloppy and too

precise. And, so, the analysis of arenas of action has been shunted aside.

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A need exists for the rebirth of research on the small group, and there is no better legitimating text than Sherif's Robbers Cave Study, with its close attention to culture, interaction, and structure. Muzafer Sherif understood that the content of group discussion (jokes, nicknames, collective symbols) is revealed through interpersonal behavior and is inextricably linked to a set of larger social processes. Issues with beneficial or malign effects on individuals operate on the group level, and changes in the orientation of groups affect these outcomes, for better or for worse. Within the group is a microcosm of the larger society that demands the creation of a sociological miniaturism- the ability to see social structure in light of the locations of action (Stolte, Fine, and Cook, 2001). It is in Intergroup Conflict and Cooperation that this critical nexus between structure, interaction, and culture can be discovered. It is worth searching out.

REFERENCES

Fine, Gary Alan, and Kimberly D. Elsbach and twenty-first century sociology." 2000 "Ethnography and experiment in Social Psychology Quarterly 63:312-

social psychological theory build- 323. ing: Tactics for integrating qualita- Stolte, John, Gary Alan Fine, and Karen Cook tive field data with quantitative lab 2001 "Sociological miniaturism: See- data." Journal of Experimental Social ing the big through the small Psychology 36:51-76. in social psychology." Annual

Harrington, Brooke, and Gary Alan Fine Review of Sociology 27:387- 2000 "Opening the black box: Small groups 413.