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Prizes turned Boy Scouts into enemies
Camp Setup
In the 1960s, Sherif separated Boy Scouts at camp into two groups and told them to get to know one another. Everything went well and nothing unusual happened.
Prizes Change Everything
Then he introduced competition for prizes. One group began discriminating against the other, and the boys got into little fights over things that had nothing to do with the contest.
The Scarcity Theory
Sherif treated the prizes as a stand-in for resources. Replace first prize with access to dwindling water, and the same dynamic gives a general explanation for why groups clash: material scarcity. He called it realistic group conflict theory.
How did Sherif get the groups to stop fighting?
Sherif's team created problems that neither group could solve alone, which he called superordinate goals. In the best-known version of the camp study, the water supply was cut off and both groups had to work together to find the fault. In another task, the boys pulled a stuck truck with a rope, using the same rope the groups had used in a tug-of-war. Ratings of the other group grew more favorable after these shared tasks.
Why did Tajfel question scarcity as the cause?
In the early 1970s, Tajfel's team showed that groups created from trivial labels still favored their own members, with no prizes, resources, or contact at stake. That suggested competition over resources was not required for bias. Social identity theory later proposed that groups give people a sense of self-worth through comparison with other groups. Both Sherif's theory and Tajfel's remain standard textbook accounts of intergroup conflict.
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