The Robbers Cave Tournament

Muzafer Sherif and the Ninety-Six-Hour Manufacture of Hatred

Two separate chartered buses bumped along the gravel roads of the Sans Bois Mountains in southeastern Oklahoma during the first week of June 1954, arriving twenty-four hours apart at a two-hundred-acre Boy Scout camp inside Robbers Cave State Park. Each bus carried eleven boys, all eleven years old and finishing the fifth grade. None of the twenty-two boys knew one another, and none suspected that the camp director, the junior counselors, the mess-hall cooks, and the handyman sweeping the porch (Mr. Mussee) were Turkish-born social psychologist Muzafer Sherif and a team of researchers from the University of Oklahoma.

Sherif had spent months designing the experiment to strip away every variable normally blamed for ethnic, religious, or national hatred. His research team had screened hundreds of families across Oklahoma City to select twenty-two boys who were statistical clones: all came from stable, two-parent, middle-class Protestant homes; all had above-average IQs and strong school records; and all had passed extensive psychological evaluations confirming zero history of behavioral problems, neurosis, or childhood trauma. If furious tribal hatred could be switched on—and then switched off—among twenty-two exceptionally well-adjusted boys from identical neighborhoods within three weeks, then group enmity was not a symptom of warped personalities or ancient blood grievances. It was a mechanical output of resource structure.

Sherif divided the twenty-two-day field experiment into three controlled structural phases:

1. 1. Phase 1 — Spontaneous In-Group Crystallization (Days 1–7): Kept completely unaware of the other busload's existence at opposite ends of the park, each cabin of eleven boys hiked, swam, cooked out, and built hideouts. Within days, each group spontaneously developed an internal status hierarchy, local slang, and a tribal name stenciled onto caps and T-shirts: one cabin named themselves the Rattlers, and the other named themselves the Eagles.
2. 2. Phase 2 — The Zero-Sum Friction Tournament (Days 8–13): Sherif allowed the two groups to discover each other using the same baseball diamond, then announced a four-day camp tournament—baseball, tug-of-war, touch football, tent-pitching, and cabin inspections. Crucially, the reward structure was strictly mutually exclusive: the winning group would receive a gleaming silver trophy plus four-bladed steel pocketknives and medals for each member; the losing group would receive nothing.
3. 3. The Failed Contact Controls (Days 14–15): Before attempting to heal the rift, Sherif tested the popular sociological belief that bringing hostile groups together in pleasant social settings reduces prejudice. He invited the Eagles and Rattlers to seven joint recreational events—eating fine meals in the same mess hall, shooting off Fourth-of-July-style fireworks, and watching movies together. Every single contact event degenerated into garbage-throwing food fights and screaming matches.
4. 4. Phase 3 — Superordinate Interdependence (Days 16–22): Sherif introduced a sequence of manufactured camp emergencies—what he termed superordinate goals—that possessed huge survival value for both groups equally but could not be solved by eleven boys working alone.

The speed of the Phase 2 escalation stunned even the observers. On the first day of the tournament, good-natured sportsmanship vanished within hours. After losing a tug-of-war match because the Rattlers sat down and dug their heels into the dirt, the Eagles pulled down the Rattlers' team flag and burned it on the pitcher's mound. That night, the Rattlers launched a commando raid on the Eagles' cabin, overturning beds, ripping mosquito netting, and stealing comic books and blue jeans. The Eagles retaliated the next afternoon by raiding the Rattlers' cabin and spending the evening filling their socks with heavy creek stones to use as medieval flails in case the Rattlers returned after dark, forcing Sherif's counselors to physically separate the groups to prevent fractured skulls.

When pleasant mess-hall dinners only supplied ammunition for mashed-potato pelting, Sherif triggered Phase 3. He secretly closed a valve on the pipeline feeding the camp's hill reservoir and stuffed two heavy burlap sacks into the faucet outlet, cutting off drinking water to both cabins in the midday heat. Thirsty Eagles and Rattlers hiked up the mountain together, cleared a rockslide around the tank, and took turns poking tools into the valve for an hour until the water gushed out. Next, when a camp truck drove out to fetch a movie rental (Treasure Island) that cost $14—more than either group held in its treasury—both cabins chipped in $3.50 each, and when the truck later stalled at their campsite, all twenty-two boys grabbed the same tug-of-war rope that had started their blood feud and pulled the vehicle uphill together. On the final afternoon of the three-week experiment, the boys who had tried to beat each other with rock-filled socks two weeks earlier voted unanimously to pool the Eagles' five-dollar prize money to buy malted milks for both groups on the bus ride back to Oklahoma City.