The End of War by John Horgan

Author:John Horgan [Horgan, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781938073045
Publisher: McSweeney's
Published: 2012-01-16T20:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIVE

Choosing Peace

As a boy growing up in Turkey in the early twentieth century, Muzafer Sherif had first hand knowledge of war’s horror. In 1919, he barely survived a massacre carried out by Greek soldiers in his hometown, Smyrna. After emigrating to America, Sherif earned a doctorate as a social psychologist and started exploring, among other topics, our tendency to separate people into “us” and “them.” He is remembered today primarily for the Robbers Cave Experiment, which he carried out in 1954. Like the studies of Milgram and Zimbardo, Sherif’s has become a classic of social science research, but it has a much happier ending.

Sherif brought twenty-two fifth-grade boys to a camp at Robbers Cave State Park in Oklahoma and divided them into two groups, Rattlers and Eagles. Sherif housed the boys in separate cabins and kept them apart for a week, during which boys in each group bonded and grew suspicious of the “others” whom they could only see and hear at a distance. Sherif finally brought the Rattlers and Eagles together and pitted them against each other in swimming races, tugs-of-war, and other competitions.

Rattlers and Eagles were soon hurling insults at each other, like “tubby,” “fatso,” “sissy,” “baby,” “communist,” and “little black Sambo” (even though all the boys were white). The boys also started “brutalizing and raiding each other with sticks, bats, and rocks in socks,” the psychologist Steven Pinker notes in his best seller How the Mind Works. Pinker cites the Sherif experiment as evidence of how readily we can be manipulated into hating and fighting others. “Jingoism is alarmingly easy to evoke,” he writes, “even without a scarce resource to fight over.”

But Pinker neglects to mention the second half of the experiment, during which Sherif presented the Rattlers and Eagles with “problems” that they could solve only by cooperating. Sherif told the boys that the camp could rent a movie, Treasure Island, only if all the boys chipped in money, which they did. Then a camp truck “broke down,” and all the boys had to push it to jump-start it. Another pseudo-malfunction forced the Rattlers and Eagles to share a truck on an outing. The hostility between the Rattlers and Eagles soon dissolved and they became friends, laughingly recalling their previous exploits against each other. On the last day at Robbers Cave, they voted to take the same bus home.

So yes, we all too readily separate people into those like “us,” whom we treat empathetically and altruistically, versus those we treat as “others.” Leaders can exploit this tendency to drum up support for persecution, repression, war, and genocide. But we can clearly also learn to overcome our hostility toward others, and not just because we have been manipulated into doing so, like the boys at Robbers Cave. We can use our reason to recognize our commonality with others, or at the very least to resolve our differences nonviolently.

Sherif extracted another optimistic lesson from his experiment. In a 1958 paper, he proposes that traditionally hostile groups can overcome their differences if they are bound together by “superordinate,” or shared, goals.

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