Friendly Boy Scouts turned into rivals as soon as prizes were on the line
A 1960s camp experiment suggested how quickly prizes could create prejudice, and inspired a theory that group conflict comes down to scarce resources.
Stuff You Should Know · Social Identity Theory: Your Group Rules, Others DroolAt a Boy Scout camp in the 1960s, the boys were divided into two groups and told to spend time together and get to know one another.
For a while, nothing unusual happened. The groups settled in, friendships formed, and everything was going pretty well.
The camp was the setup for an experiment by Muzafer Sherif, a social psychologist interested in why groups come into conflict. He wanted to watch what would happen when ordinary boys were made into an us and a them.
Then Sherif changed one thing. He introduced competition for prizes. One group could win blue ribbons, the other would get participant ribbons, and from that point the mood shifted fast.
The camp quickly became what one account called Lord of the Flies: William Golding's novel about boys stranded on an island who turn savage. Group A began discriminating against Group B, and the friction spilled beyond the contests themselves into little fights and other clashes unrelated to the prizes.
The prize-driven rivalry became the basis for what Sherif called realistic group conflict theory. The prizes, he argued, stood in for resources in the wider world, whether trophies, jobs, land, or dwindling water.
When groups must compete for something scarce, the theory argued, prejudice and fighting follow, even among boys who had gotten along fine just before.
Questions people ask
Who was Muzafer Sherif?
Muzafer Sherif was a Turkish American social psychologist and one of the founders of modern social psychology. The camp study is usually called the Robbers Cave experiment, after the state park in Oklahoma where the best known version took place. He is also known for early work on how group norms form.
What is realistic group conflict theory?
It is the idea that prejudice and conflict between groups come from competition over limited material things, like jobs, land, water, or political power. When resources feel scarce, groups see each other as threats. When competition eases or groups work toward shared goals, the theory predicts that hostility should ease too.
What does the Lord of the Flies comparison mean?
It is a 1954 novel by William Golding about British schoolboys stranded on an island who split into rival groups and turn violent. The phrase has become shorthand for a civilized group falling quickly into hostility and rule breaking. That is the comparison being made about the campers.