Subliminal

For these kids, revenge meant ripping the mosquito netting off the beds, yelling insults, and grabbing a prized pair of blue jeans. Then, as their victims awoke, the invaders ran back to their own cabin as suddenly as they had arrived. They’d intended to inflict insult, not injury. Sounds like nothing more than a typical story of summer camp gone awry, but this camp was different. As these boys played and fought, ate and talked, planned and plotted, a corps of adults was secretly watching and listening, studying their every move with neither their knowledge nor their consent.

The boys at Robbers Cave that summer had been enrolled in a pioneering and ambitious—and, by today’s standards, unethical—field experiment in social psychology.¹ According to a later report on the study, the experimental subjects had been carefully chosen for uniformity. A researcher laboriously screened each child before recruiting him, surreptitiously observing him on the playground and perusing his school records. The subjects were all middle-class, Protestant, Caucasian, and of average intelligence. All were well-adjusted boys who had just completed the fifth grade. None knew any of the others. After targeting two hundred prospects, the researchers had approached their parents offering a good deal. They could enroll their son in a three-week summer camp for a nominal fee, provided they agreed to have no contact with their child throughout that period. During that time, the parents were told, the researchers would study the boys and their “interactions in group activities.”

Twenty-two sets of parents took the bait. The researchers divided the boys into two groups of eleven, balanced for height, weight, athletic ability, popularity, and certain skills related to the activities they would be engaging in at camp. The groups were assembled separately, not told of each other’s existence, and kept isolated during their first week. In that week, there were really two boys’ camps at Robbers Cave, and the boys in each were kept unaware of the other.

As the campers engaged in baseball games, singing, and other normal camp activities, they were watched closely by their counselors, who in reality were all researchers studying them and secretly taking notes. One point of interest to the researchers was whether, how, and why each collection of boys would coalesce into a cohesive group. And coalesce they did, each group forming its own identity, choosing a name (the Rattlers and the Eagles), creating a flag, and coming to share “preferred songs, practices and peculiar norms” that were different from those of the other group. But the real point of the study was to investigate how and why, once the groups had coalesced, they would react to the presence of a new group. And so, after the first week, the Rattlers and the Eagles were introduced to each other.

Films and novels depicting either the distant past or the postapocalyptic future warn that isolated groups of Homo sapiens should always be approached with care, their members more likely to cut off your nose than offer you free incense. The physicist Stephen Hawking once famously endorsed that view, arguing that it would be better to beware of aliens than to invite them in for tea. Human colonial history seems to confirm this. When people from one nation land on the shores of another with a far different culture, they may say they come in peace, but they soon start shooting. In this case, the Rattlers and Eagles had their Christopher Columbus moment at the start of the second week. That’s when an observer-counselor separately told each group of the other’s existence. The groups had a similar reaction: let’s challenge the other to a sports tournament. After some negotiations, a series of events was arranged to take place over the following week, including baseball games, tug-of-war matches, tent-pitching contests, and a treasure hunt. Camp counselors agreed to provide trophies, medals, and prizes for the winners.

It didn’t take long for the Rattlers and the Eagles to settle into the dynamics of the countless other warring factions that had preceded them. On the first day of competition, after losing at tug-of-war, the Eagles, on their way back to their cabin, happened by the ball field where the Rattlers had hung their flag high up on the backstop. A couple of Eagles, agitated about getting beaten, climbed up and took it down. They set it on fire, and when the fire went out, one of them climbed back up and rehung it. The counselors had no response to the flag burning, except to dutifully and surreptitiously take their notes. And then they arranged the next meeting of the members of the two groups, who were told that they would now compete at baseball and other activities.

After breakfast the following morning, the Rattlers were taken to the ball field, where, while they waited for the Eagles to arrive, they discovered their burnt flag. The researchers watched as the Rattlers plotted their retaliation, which resulted in a mass brawl when the Eagles did show up. The staff observed for a while, then intervened to stop the fighting. But the feud continued, with the Rattlers’ raid on the Eagles’ cabin the next night, and other events in the days that followed. The researchers had hoped that by setting up groups with competitive goals but no inherent differences, they could observe the generation and evolution of derogatory social stereotypes, genuine intergroup hostility, and all the other symptoms of intergroup conflict we humans are known for. They were not disappointed. Today, the boys of Robbers Cave are past retirement age, but the tale of their summer, and the researchers’ analysis of it, is still being cited in the psychological literature.

Humans have always lived in bands. If competing in a tug-of-war contest generated intergroup hostility, imagine the hostility between bands of humans with too many mouths to feed and too few elephant carcasses to dine on. Today we think of war as being at least in part based on ideology, but the desire for food and water is the strongest ideology. Long before communism, democracy, or theories of racial superiority were invented, neighboring groups of people regularly fought with and even massacred each other, inspired by the competition for resources.² In such an environment, a highly evolved sense of “us versus them” would have been crucial to survival.

There was also a sense of “us versus them” within bands, for, as in other hominid species, prehistoric humans formed alliances and coalitions inside their own groups.³ While a talent for office politics is useful in the workplace today, twenty thousand years ago group dynamics might determine who got fed, and the human resources department might have disciplined slackers with a spear through the back. So if the ability to pick up cues that signal political allegiances is important in contemporary work, in prehistoric times it was vital, for the equivalent of being fired was being dead.

Scientists call any group that people feel part of an “in-group,” and any group that excludes them an “out- group.” As opposed to the colloquial usage, the terms “in-group” and “out-group” in this technical sense refer not to the popularity of those in the groups but simply to the us-them distinction. It is an important distinction because we think differently about members of groups we are part of and those in groups we are not part of, and, as we shall see, we also behave differently toward them. And we do this automatically, regardless of whether or not we consciously intend to discriminate between the groups. In the last chapter I talked about how putting other people into categories affects our assessment of them. Putting ourselves into in- and out-group categories also has an effect—on the way we see our own place in the world and on how we view others. In what follows we’ll learn what happens when we use categorization to define ourselves, to differentiate “us” from others.

WE ALL BELONG to many in-groups. As a result, our self-identification shifts from situation to situation. At different times the same person might think of herself as a woman, an executive, a Disney employee, a Brazilian, or a mother, depending on which is relevant—or which makes her feel good at the time. Switching the in-group affiliation we’re adopting for the moment is a trick we all use, and it’s helpful in maintaining a cheery outlook, for the in-groups we identify with are an important component of our self-image. Both experimental and field studies have found, in fact, that people will make large financial sacrifices to help establish a feeling of belonging to an in- group they aspire to feel part of.⁴ That’s one reason, for example, that people pay so much to be members of exclusive country clubs, even if they don’t utilize the facilities. A computer games executive once shared with me a great example of the willingness to give up money for the prestige of a coveted in-group identity. One of his senior producers marched into his office after finding out that he had given another producer a promotion and raise. He told her he couldn’t promote her for a while yet, because of financial constraints. But she was insistent on being given a raise, now that she knew her colleague had gotten one. It was tough for this executive because his business was ultracompetitive, and other companies were always hovering in the background looking to steal good producers, yet he didn’t have the funds to hand out raises to all who deserved them. After discussing the matter for a while, he noticed that what really bothered his employee was not the lack of a raise but that the other producer, who was junior to her, now had the same title. And so they agreed on a compromise: he would promote her and give her a new title now, but the raise would come later. Like the country club sales office, this executive had awarded her a high-status in-group membership in exchange for money. Advertisers are very much attuned to that dynamic. That’s why, for example, Apple spends hundreds of millions of dollars on marketing campaigns in an attempt to associate the Mac in-group with smarts, elegance, and hipness, and the PC in-group with loser qualities, the opposites of those.