I know I’m very late to this thread, but I wanted to mention that this article also provides reasons to not place too much weight on Sherif’s results. (Although of course the broad inferences drawn from his results might happen to be true anyway.) In particular, the article suggests Sherif had attempted a similar study earlier (in another location, with other boys), did not find the results he wanted (despite manipulation), and then suppressed that attempt’s results:
Despite his pretence of leaving the 11-year-olds to their own devices, Sherif and his research staff, posing as camp counsellors and caretakers, interfered to engineer the result they wanted. He believed he could make the two groups, called the Pythons and the Panthers, sworn enemies via a series of well-timed “frustration exercises”. These included his assistants stealing items of clothing from the boys’ tents and cutting the rope that held up the Panthers’ homemade flag, in the hope they would blame the Pythons. One of the researchers crushed the Panthers’ tent, flung their suitcases into the bushes and broke a boy’s beloved ukulele. To Sherif’s dismay, however, the children just couldn’t be persuaded to hate each other.
After losing a tug-of-war, the Pythons declared that the Panthers were in fact the better team and deserved to win. The boys concluded that the missing clothes were the result of a mix-up at the laundry. And, after each of the Pythons swore on a Bible that they didn’t cut down the Panthers’ flag, any conflict “fizzled”. By the time of the incident with the suitcases and the ukulele, the boys had worked out that they were being manipulated. Instead of turning on each other, they helped put the tent back up and eyed their “camp counsellors” with suspicion. “Maybe you just wanted to see what our reactions would be,” one of them said.
That said, the article doesn’t seem to provide evidence of substantial manipulation during the Robbers Cave study itself. So perhaps the conclusion to draw from Sherif’s pair of studies is that, under such conditions, intense intergroup conflict will arise naturally roughly half the time.
Note that this article isn’t included in the latest edition of Rationality: AI to Zombies, for roughly the reasons listed here (if I remember correctly).
I know I’m very late to this thread, but I wanted to mention that this article also provides reasons to not place too much weight on Sherif’s results. (Although of course the broad inferences drawn from his results might happen to be true anyway.) In particular, the article suggests Sherif had attempted a similar study earlier (in another location, with other boys), did not find the results he wanted (despite manipulation), and then suppressed that attempt’s results:
That said, the article doesn’t seem to provide evidence of substantial manipulation during the Robbers Cave study itself. So perhaps the conclusion to draw from Sherif’s pair of studies is that, under such conditions, intense intergroup conflict will arise naturally roughly half the time.
Note that this article isn’t included in the latest edition of Rationality: AI to Zombies, for roughly the reasons listed here (if I remember correctly).