What Does The Robbers Cave Experiment Really Tell Us About The Current Political Polarization?

 The On the Media episode from 30 October 2020, Chaos Reigns (linked to at right), opens with an interview by co-host Bob Garfield of Lilliana Mason, a political psychologist at the University of Maryland. Their discussion explores, according to the notes accompanying the podcast, “why our political landscape became so polarized, and where we might go from here.” Garfield introduces the segment by noting that it had first aired “two years ago,” so in the 2018 time frame.

Early in the interview (starting at 6:27), Garfield asks Mason about a recent book she had published: 

Now what you’ve described is really the wholesale resorting of the electorate into more easily defined worldviews, right? Leading us not just to parties, but to tribes. What is the psychology of that tribalism? And maybe we can begin with the Robbers Cave Experiment that you’ve written about. 

Mason then describes that experiment as follows: 

In 1954, some psychologists collected a bunch of fifth grade boys from the Oklahoma City area and really tried very hard to make sure that all the boys were very, very similar to each other psychologically, socially, in terms of their academic abilities, traits - sort of in every possible way, they were similar to each other. They were all white and Protestant boys.

They divided them into two camps and they kept the boys completely separate for the first week of camp. And the boys came up with their own names for what their camps were called. One was the Rattlers and one was the Eagles. 

And in the second week, they let them know that there was another camp down the road. And immediately the boys wanted to have a competition, and the experimenters encouraged this. And the more the boys competed, the more they began to hate each other. They called each other nasty names. They began throwing rocks at one another. And at one point it got so violent that the experimenters had to separate them because they were so worried about the boy's safety. So really, all that it took was separating them into two different groups and allowing them to form an identity and then letting them sort of have at each other.” 

Mason then proceeds to use the outcome of this experiment as a basis for concluding that human beings have 

a deep-seated, psychological motive [to sort into groups]. Once we are in a group, we think our group is the best and we think that the other groups are less good. And if we're in competition with those groups, we begin to hate them. 

One consequence of this conclusion becomes that the aggressive efforts being made by factions to encourage polarization are understood as being in the context of reinforcing the putatively natural human tendency to sort into antagonistically competitive groups.

As I listened to the interview, and in particular Mason’s description of the Robbers Cave Experiment, I eventually recalled having heard it upon its initial release, two years before, and having at the time found it plausible as an explanation for the political polarization we face in the United States – as demonstrated by the presidential election in 2016, and the increasing antagonism since. Thus, the results of the experiment had found purchase, as I listened to the initial airing, with my underlying expectations about human behavior.

But. Hearing the interview this second time also triggered a recollection of a description of the Robbers Cave Experiment I’d read more recently, in historian Rutger Bregman’s book Humankind: A Hopeful History, published in 2019. As I subsequently described in my review of his book (linked to at right), Bregman opens by observing that, based on a deep-seated belief that competition and greed are fundamental and even necessary characteristics of human nature, it has come to be widely accepted that absent a thin veneer of civilization people’s true, selfish nature would emerge, thereby precipitating an inevitable collapse of society into violent anarchy.

Bregman goes on to argue though, as the thesis of his book, that our received wisdom about human nature is not only wrong, but worse it undermines our ability to progress further on our project of civilization. Using a fresh analysis of human history, he rebuts the presumption that humans are inherently selfish, an assumption that he notes has been largely unchallenged doctrine for millennia.

Exploring in detail numerous examples, Bregman demonstrates how misunderstandings and misinterpretations of historical events and, in particular psychology experiments, have captured the popular imagination, and thereby supported what he refers to as a cynical view of human nature. 

Among the experiments he examines, some are relatively well-known, such as the Stanford Prison Experiment, while others, such as the Robbers Cave Experiment, less so. But his research into them reveals that incorrect interpretations of their execution and conclusions have fit neatly – too neatly as it turns out – into existing cynical assumptions about human nature, both among the general public, as well as psychologists, historians, journalists and others, few of whom have apparently gone back to the original case studies to verify the actual details of these experiments.

Regarding the Robbers Cave Experiment in particular, Bregman first gives the standard understanding of what happened, a telling that largely aligns with Mason’s description above. He then notes, in a paragraph that reads as though he had just finished listening to Garfield’s interview with Mason, that: 

The story of the Robbers Cave Experiment has made a comeback in recent years, especially since Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. I can’t tell you how many pundits have pointed to this study as the anecdotal key to understanding our times. Aren’t the Rattles and the Eagles a symbol for the ubiquitous lashes between left and right, conservative and progressive?

Having played to our expectations, Bregman then, however, reports on what he eventually learned had actually transpired during the experiment, as contained in the “original 1961 research report” by the organizer of the experiment, the “Turkish psychologist Muzafer Sherif.” And he turns out to have discovered a reality quite different from the prevailing understanding of what happened.

He quotes Sherif as writing “on one of the first pages [that] ‘Negative attitudes towards outgroups will be generated situationally.’” Reading further, Bregman notes that: 

I found some interesting facts. For starters, it wasn’t the kids themselves, but the experimenters who decided to hold a week of competitions. The Eagles weren’t keen on the idea. ‘Maybe we could make friends with those guys,’ one boy suggested, ‘and then somebody wouldn’t get made and have any grudges.’ 

And at the researchers’ insistence, the groups only played games that had clear-cut winners and losers, like baseball and tug-of-war. There were no consolation prizes, and the researchers manipulated scores to ensure the teams would say in a neck-and-neck race.

More damningly, Bregman discovered through the work of Gina Perry, an Australian psychologist who had taken the time to review the source material from the Robbers Cave Experiment and wrote a book on it, that Sherif had tried the experiment before, in Australia, in 1953. For her book, Perry “dug through reams of notes and recordings, [in which] she uncovered a story that contradicts everything the textbooks have been repeating for the past fifty years.” It turns out that that experiment had failed miserably, as the boys simply refused to fight, despite the experimenters having “deployed every trick in the book to turn the two teams against each other.” 

Thus, notes Bregman, far from these experiments demonstrating in the boys a natural tendency toward aggression and competition, the results seemed to indicate a predisposition toward cooperation and alliance.

The irony, for me, is that I was first led to Bregman’s book (if indirectly) through an interview he had with Brooke Gladstone on … On the Media! (5 June 2020 episode, linked to at right). Thus, the result has been two interviews on the same program that seemingly contradict one another in their presumed understanding about a documented experiment. Admittedly, Bregman’s findings about the Robbers Cave Experiment were not specifically mentioned in Gladstone’s interview with him. But, based on how their discussion developed and the many other examples from the book that were discussed, it seems clear that Gladstone had read the book and so would have learned about Bregman’s surprising discoveries about this particular experiment.

Full disclosure: I’m a big fan (and supporter) of On the Media, and I’m not blaming Gladstone and Garfield for not making the connection between these segments recorded almost two years apart. But one of their hobby-horses on the show over the years has been that the media so often tend to pass along uncritically popular statements and conclusions, and so there is more than a bit of irony that these two interviews end up pointing out an apparently long-standing, uncritically passed down understanding about an experiment whose actual results can be accurately ascertained from available documentation.

And, ultimately, this is more than just a ‘gotcha’ moment.

To have any real hope of addressing the increasing polarization the US has experienced over the past decade, we must first come to a sound understanding of its origins. Is it fundamental to human nature that people separate themselves into opposing groups, as has come to be commonly assumed, and as the psychologist who organized the Robbers Cave Experiment was convinced is true? Or, as Bregman argues, has such polarization actually been driven by leaders intent on maintaining their power, and who, in fact, have encouraged a cynical view of human nature, consciously working to overcome a natural human tendency toward cooperation and collaboration?