The Experiment at Robber’s Cave: are Humans Contentious or Cooperative?

The Experiment at Robber’s Cave:

Are Humans Contentious or Cooperative?

by john M Repp

Robber’s Cave is the name of a State Park in Oklahoma where Muzafer Sherif conducted a very famous social science experiment in 1954. Sherif, a social psychologist, brought twenty-two fifth grade boys to a camp and divided them into two groups, the Rattlers and the Eagles. Each group stayed in a separate cabin for a week and was kept apart. Then the Rattlers and the Eagles were pitted against each other in competitive games and skits.

Before long the boys started hurling insults at each other like “fatso,” “sissy,” “baby,” and “communist.” Then they began to raid each other’s cabins carrying sticks, bats and rocks in socks. Steven Pinker in his 1997 bestseller How the Mind Works describes Sherif’s experiment as proof of how easy it is to separate people into “us” and “them.” “Jingoism is alarmingly easy to evoke even without a scarce resource to fight over.” (p.513)

Pinker, a scientist who is also a very popular science writer, fails to mention what Sherif did during the second half of the experiment. Sherif told the boys that the camp could rent the movie Treasure Island only if all the boys chipped in for the cost. They did. Then Sherif “arranged” for the camp truck to break down and all twenty-two of the boys had to push it to get it started. Another “malfunction” forced the Rattlers and the Eagles to share a truck for an outing. The hostility between the two groups soon dissolved. Boys from the different groups became friends and laughed at their previous exploits against each other. All chose to take the same bus home after camp.

Sherif wrote another paper in 1958 where he proposed that traditionally hostile groups are able to overcome their differences if they are bound together by shared goals. John Horgan in his 2012 book The End of War makes the analogy between the Rattlers and the Eagles and the sovereign nation-states which are embedded in the war system. Today the global community has many shared goals but Horgan writes that two stand out. “One is figuring out how we can all prosper in every sense – materially as well as spiritually – without irrevocably damaging our planet. Another, which will help the first, is ending war.” (p.127)

Current human evolutionary scientists are telling us that the human ability to cooperate on a vast scale is what makes us special. (See Scientific American, Sept. 2014, pp. 69-71) Even our ability to think is cooperative if we consider that we use language, a social product, to form and express our thoughts. Cooperation is how bands of early humans survived the last ice age maximal 70,000 years ago – cooperation within the nomadic bands and between the nomadic bands. Our species was too sparse, too on the edge, to engage in competitive killing. A conflict over resources would result in dispersal not war.

If only our political leaders had the wisdom of our ancient ancestors and the knowledge of our contemporary scientists!

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