These emphases led us to classify Sherif with others who vigorously rejected psychological displacement theories, for most of whom “realistic group conflict theory” was an appropriate label. In emphasis on social organization factors he belongs. But the emphasis on “real” bases of competition (on “zero sum” intergroup competition, as it were), is more characteristic of the others we place in that category than it is of Sherif. Revisions of our classification and labeling are probably in order.
But Sherif’s leadership points up a still greater need for a revision of the propositional inventories that make up our book, Ethnocentrism. As we realized at the time but lacked the energy to do, we should have searched each of the ten theories for their implications as to how to reduce intergroup conflict. It is going this last important step that so uniquely characterizes Sherif’s efforts. In the present book, it is shown in the successful experiment in removing intergroup conflict after the successful experiment in creating it. The last third of In Common Predicament (Sherif 1966) provides a rich discussion of many methods and “creative alternatives.”
These pioneering experimental studies of intergroup conflict, needless to say, have inspired a host of small group experiments. Our coauthor, Marilynn Brewer, has done a number of them and has provided reviews of the literature (Brewer 1979; Brewer and Miller 1984). These studies confirm the Robbers Cave findings but do not replace them. Each new study involves many replications of one of the phenomena, and the pooling of studies shows how dependable the findings are. But—as Brewer would agree—each study involves a trivial amount of the participant’s time, less than an hour as a rule, instead of the three weeks of 24-hour days in the present study. Each achieves a trivial degree of involvement and samples the effects in a very narrow spectrum of measures. There have been no subsequent studies of anywhere near the magnitude of the Robbers Cave experiment. Reading it, owning a copy for repeated referral, becomes essential for anyone specializing in the interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary areas of intergroup and international conflict.
Finally, an excellence and uniqueness of method needs noting. In the social sciences today, many are abandoning quantitative research methods for qualitative, humanistic ones. Experimental approaches get left behind as though uniquely appropriate to the quantitative. The polarity of methods has, of course, been continually with us since Dilthey and Weber at least, with most social scientists feeling it necessary to identify with one pole to the exclusion of the other. Not so Sherif. Just as, in his 1936 book, he assembled laboratory and anthropological evidence to corroborate the same principles, so in the present study, the methods of the ethnographic participant observer are combined with experimentation and quantification. We might well designate the Robbers Cave study as experimental anthropology.
The experimental generation of intergroup conflict plays an essential role that no passive ethnography of a naturally occurring intergroup conflict could achieve. In this arena the contenders are not only psychological and sociological theories. By far the commonest are historical-particularist explanations, in which hostilities and hostile images are explained in terms of the specific history of interaction of the groups in question. Such causal explanations dominate the work of historians and descriptive political scientists. They also dominate in the explanations of the contending groups. The passive anthropologist of an intergroup conflict cannot avoid such explanations, no matter how careful the effort to avoid casual interpretation entirely.
One of the valuable slogans of the new emphasis on qualitative, contextual methodology is “thick description” (Geertz 1973). The Robbers Cave study provides such thick description. Moreover, the many ingenious subexperiments that are introduced, with their “natural” opportunities for quantitative measurement, add greatly to the “thickness,” creating opportunities for participant action and qualitative observation that would not otherwise have existed, as well as providing quantitative measures. In this study, better than anywhere else I can think of, the proper synthesis of the qualitative-versus-quantitative dialectic is achieved.
Donald T. Campbell
University Professor of Social Relations,
Psychology, and Education
Lehigh University
June 1987
Preface to the Wesleyan Edition
We planned originally to present the Robbers Cave experiment first as a research report and then, after slight revisions, as a book. New commitments and new careers stalled the revisions, however, and postponed publication of the book indefinitely. A report of the study was circulated in multilithed form in 1954 and, with an additional chapter, in 1961 as a publication of the Institute of Group Relations and the Book Exchange of the University of Oklahoma. Now, some 33 years later than planned, the study is appearing as a book due to the initiative of the editors of Wesleyan University Press.
The continued widespread citation of the study despite limited circulation of its earlier reports and its publication by a university press so long after its completion both attest to the timelessness of the issues with which the study dealt. We would like to believe, as Professor Donald Campbell implies in his Introduction to this volume, that our treatment of the issues, as well as their timelessness, helped to sustain the interest that has been shown in the study by representatives of diverse disciplines for over three decades.
Donald Campbell’s characterization of the study as “experimental anthropology” is certainly apt. While the study employed the method of participant observation, until recently the main research tool of the social anthropologist, it did so for the unique purpose of recording information on group interactions and other social processes elicited by experimentally induced conditions. It might well be, in fact, that the most distinctive feature of the study was the unusual way in which it combined field and experimental methods. Most of the more important hypotheses were derived from earlier naturalistic observations of groups and larger organizations by sociologists and anthropologists. The experimental method was used to elicit the operation of the variables suggested by naturalistic observations, and both the participant observation and experimental methods were employed to record the outcomes. This approach reflected a deeply held epistemic assumption by Professor Sherif, that consistency of outcomes across different methods and levels of analysis is a far more stringent criterion of validity than one method or level can yield alone.
Although, as Don Campbell notes in his Introduction, Muzafer Sherif was one of the founding fathers of present-day social psychology and has made notable contributions to the understanding of groups and attitude change since the Robbers Cave study, that study is the object of his greatest professional pride. Those of us who participated in the study with him, including Bob Hood and Carolyn Sherif, both now deceased, shared that pride.
The present ill health of both Professors Sherif and White have sadly made it appropriate for me to be the person from among us to work with members of the Wesleyan University Press in the publication of this book. From the time when he first contacted me a few months ago, Peter Potter, an editor of the Wesleyan University Press, and Jan Fitter, the copy editor for this volume, have made my job unusually easy. Our common objective has been to produce a book that in no way changes the basic content and intent of the earlier reports of the Robbers Cave experiment. Thanks are extended to the editors for their major contribution to this objective and, even more, for their unsolicited decision to publish this study in the first place.
Muzafer Sherif, Jack White, and I wish to extend special thanks