In-Groups and Out-Groups and Relationships Between Groups

1Eagles and Rattlers

In the summer of 1954 the Turkish-American psychologist Muzafer Sherif and his colleagues ran a summer camp at Robbers Cave State Park in Oklahoma, United States. Twenty-two 11- and 12-year-old boys, carefully matched to be similar, were taken in two separate buses to two separate sites. For about a week, neither group knew the other existed. Each group hiked, swam and cooked together, chose a name (the "Rattlers" and the "Eagles"), made a flag and developed its own norms and leaders.

Then the researchers told each group about the other and set up a tournament of games, with prizes only for the winners. Within days the boys were calling each other names, burning each other's flags and raiding each other's cabins. Ordinary, well-adjusted boys had become hostile groups, simply by competing for something only one side could have (Sherif and colleagues, 1961).

21. Boundaries, values and culture

Every group draws boundaries. Some are physical (a school compound, a village), some social (rules for joining, such as paying a cooperative's membership fee) and many symbolic: uniforms, songs, slogans, greetings, ways of speaking. The anthropologist Fredrik Barth (1969) argued that what keeps a group distinct is often the boundary itself, which members actively maintain, more than any fixed set of cultural traits inside it. People and customs cross boundaries, yet the boundary persists.

Inside the boundary, groups develop shared values (what matters: winning, loyalty, honesty, faith) and a group culture: stories, rituals, in-jokes and ways of doing things that newcomers must learn. A school's motto, its houses and its graduation ceremony are parts of its culture that build identity.

32. How "us" and "them" change perception

• In-group favouritism: treating in-group members better, even in minimal groups (Unit 2).
• Out-group homogeneity effect: George Quattrone and Edward Jones (1980) found that students at two rival American universities, Princeton and Rutgers, saw the other university's students as more alike than their own.
• The black sheep effect: José Marques and colleagues (1988) found that a badly behaved in-group member is judged more harshly than a badly behaved out-group member, because he threatens the in-group's good image.
• Ethnocentrism: taking one's own group's customs as "normal" and judging others' as strange or inferior.

43. Relationships between groups

Groups can relate to one another in several ways: cooperation (working together for shared goals), competition (seeking the same scarce goal), conflict (trying to harm or defeat the other), accommodation (agreeing to coexist despite differences), and, for a minority group living within a larger society, one of four strategies described by John Berry (1997):

In a study of more than 5,000 immigrant young people in 13 countries, Berry and colleagues (2006) found that those who followed an integration strategy were, on average, the best adapted psychologically and socially, and those who were marginalised the worst. A family moving to Kigali from abroad, a student from a rural district joining a city boarding school, or refugees settling in a host community all face these choices, and the host group's attitudes affect which strategies are possible.

54. Back to Robbers Cave: what does it show?

Sherif's explanation became realistic conflict theory: hostility between groups grows when they compete for scarce resources, and falls when they must cooperate for goals neither can reach alone (Lesson 4). The study is famous, but it needs careful evaluation:

• The boys were all white, Protestant and middle-class, and the researchers chose them to be alike, so we cannot generalise easily.
• Gina Perry (2018), using Sherif's archives, showed that an earlier camp study in 1953 at Middle Grove, New York, had failed: the boys did not turn on each other, suspected that they were being manipulated, and the study was abandoned. At Robbers Cave, staff may have encouraged the hostility.
• Neither the boys nor, fully, their parents knew the true purpose, which would not be acceptable today.
• Tajfel's minimal group studies (Unit 2) show that favouritism can appear without any competition, so competition is a powerful cause of conflict but not the only one.