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The Robbers CaveExperiment
Intergroup Conflictand Cooperation
Muzafer Sherif, O. J. Harvey,B. Jack White, William R. Hood,Carolyn W. Sherif
With a New Introduction by
Donald T. Campbell
Wesleyan University Press
Middletown, Connecticut
Copyright © 1988 by Muzafer Sherif
Introduction copyright © 1988 by Donald T. Campbell
Preface to the Wesleyan Edition copyright © 1988 by O. J. Harvey
All rights reserved
This book was first published by the Institute of Group Relations, the University of Oklahoma in 1961.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Intergroup conflict and cooperation: the robbers cave experiment
Muzafer Sherif… [et al.].—1st Wesleyan ed.
p. cm.
Reprint. Previously published: Norman, Okla.: University Book
Exchange, 1961.
Includes index.
ISBN 0-8195-5103-1 ISBN 0-8195-6194-0 (pbk.)
1. Small groups—Case studies. 2. Intergroup relations—Case
studies. 3. Social interaction—Case studies. I. Sherif, Muzafer,
1905– . II. Title: Robbers cave experiment.
HM133.1545 1988
302.3’4—dc19 87-18349
CIP
All inquiries and permissions requests should be addressed to the Publisher, Wesleyan University Press, 110 Mt. Vernon Street, Middletown, Connecticut 06457
Distributed by Harper & Row Publishers, Keystone Industrial Park,
Scranton, Pennsylvania 18512
Manufactured in the United States of America
First Wesleyan Edition, 1988
Cover illustration by Jeanette Olender.
Introduction to the Wesleyan Edition
by Donald T. Campbell
It is indeed an honor to provide an introduction to this full report on the very best of Muzafer Sherif’s great field experiments on intergroup conflict and conflict resolution. I accept this honor as a representative of my generation of social psychologists, testifying to Sherif’s influence upon us. This allows me a personalization of the evidence presented and requires me to place the Robbers Cave experiment in the context of Sherif’s and my own life work. The social processes of esteem formation, which have made me eligible to be invited to do this introduction, have focused on my work on research methods for nonlaboratory social research. But it is not methodological concerns that bring one into a field, and the descriptive and theoretical interests of my career serve to illustrate both Sherif’s agenda and his influence on our field.
Before me as I write are 10 of the 20 or so books Muzafer Sherif has produced so far in his long and productive life. These 10 not only bracket his career, they also bracket mine. His 1936 Psychology of Social Norms introduced me to my own 50-year-long career in social psychology. It was assigned in my first social psychology course at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1938 or 1939. My instructor was Robert Tryon who, in a midcareer change, was also beginning his career in social psychology. As I finished my degree at age 31, after wartime interruption, my education and orientation was given a finish by the great and compendious Psychology of Ego-Involvements (Sherif and Cantril 1947). Early in my own career as a teacher of introductory social psychology, I used his 1948 text, and later on its revisions.
Back to The Psychology of Social Norms: what a marvelous 200 pages. While there had been some experimental social psychology before this work—as on the effect of the presence of others on individual task efficiency—Sherif’s norm-formation experiments with the autokinetic phenomena effectively founded the field, as well as providing what has probably been the single most widely used experimental task. The book is effectively addressed to introductory students, being full of current events and human interest illustrations. Yet it is impressively erudite, with an unprecedented range of interdisciplinary citations: a third of the references are to anthropology; another third to experiments and theory in Gestalt psychology. Also well represented are the old tradition of psychophysical judgment, Piaget, Freudian psychology, sociology, moral and value theory from philosophy and sociology, and the then new social psychological research on racial and ethnic attitudes.
It is because of this book that Gardner Murphy (1948) can say, “To those who have followed the extraordinary transformation of social psychology in recent years, it will seem a trifle absurd that I should write an introduction to Muzafer Sherif. To him more than any other single person is attributable the whole manner of approaching social psychology which characterizes the present period.” This is from the Gardner Murphy who himself was clearly a cofounder of modern social psychology with his paradigmatic Experimental Social Psychology (Murphy and Murphy 1931; and especially, Murphy, Murphy, and Newcomb 1937) and who directed Sherif’s dissertation. (Sherif also studied with Otto Klineberg, and notes his influence [Sherif and Sherif, 1969, p. viii].)
Whereas today experimental social psychology is carried out in isolation from the other social sciences, Sherif made it centrally relevant, with an all-important message that most psychologists and philosophers have yet to learn. The Robbers Cave Experiment, of course, moves beyond the isolated individual and group norm formation of 1936 into the still more powerful formation of social norms under conditions of intergroup competition, where the norms now include ingroup solidarity and outgroup hostility.
Sherif stresses (in 1936 and in the present volume) that we are experientially unaware of these social and individual sources of norm formation. Instead, we project them upon the world as intrinsic attributes of it, as though directly perceived. He refers to experiential “absolutism” and the “natural” and “common sense” nature of the resulting perceptions (1936, 16–17, and passim). He found that these attributes also obtained for the repeated estimates of the length of apparent movement of the dot of light in the autokinetic phenomena. He and the other authors of the present volume continue that interest, providing many examples of the experiential absolutism that accompanies distorted perceptions of visible performances of both outgroup members and ingroup leaders, as well as the skewed perceptions of their personalities and moral characteristics. Sherif’s rich use of anthropological illustrations makes the same point, and led to the prominence given his work in Melville Herskovits’s influential presentation of cultural relativism (Herskovits 1948). It is this most important aspect of cultural relativism that philosophers neglect most in their many recent analyses of the problem.
In one form or another, this theme has inspired a number of my scholarly efforts. In a major theoretical effort, I attempted to account for this experiential pseudo-objectivity by speculation as to where conscious experience was located in the neural chain of sensory input, association, and response (Campbell 1963, 1967, 1969). This led me to affirm Sherif’s dictum of “the unity of experience and behavior” (e.g., Sherif and Sherif 1956, 72). Although I will not take the space here to explain the important hindsight involved, I nonetheless commend it to the attention of all who are interested in the phenomenon.