The boy of the Robles Cave Experiment
In 1954, to test his theory of social behavior, psychologist Muzafer Shefir released 22 12-year-old boys to an unattended wilderness camp and then secretly incited them to fight.
That summer, Sharif took 22 boys to the foothills of the St. Boyce Mountains in southeastern Oklahoma. There, in Robes Cave State Park, he intends to conduct an unprecedented social experiment in the Oklahoma wilderness to pit these unsupervised 12-year-old boys against each other.
This is the Robles Cave Experiment, a field experiment that studies group conflict and aggression.
For nearly 60 years, experts have called the experiment unethical because it appears to have caused lasting mental damage to subjects.
Movie clip from Lord of the Flies
The first experiment: Middle Grove Experimental Camp
Sharif was born in the Ottoman Empire and studied psychology at Harvard University. He soon realized that the lab's research on mice was too limited, and he wanted a more complex subject: humans.
Obsession with social psychology reached its peak after World War II, so Sharif received a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation.
His initial experiment required 11-year-old boys to be sent to Middle Grove Park in upstate New York under the name of summer camp. There, Sharif would divide the boys into groups, have them compete with each other for prizes, and then try to reunite them with a series of frustrating and life-threatening events, such as forest fires.
Apparently, neither the parents nor the boys knew it was a study.
The Robes Cave Experiment was Sharif's second, as his research in Middle Grove in the summer of 1953 did not achieve the results he had hoped.
Children in the experiment
He is seeking confirmation of his "realistic conflict theory," which holds that even when competing with friends and allies for limited resources, groups unite in the face of a common catastrophe, regardless of who those allies are.
The boys in Middle Grove disagree with this theory. Despite the difficulties, they remain friends, even as Sharif has his employees steal their clothes, tear down their tents, smash their toys, and frame other campers.
The Middle Grove Camp experiment ended in a drunken brawl between the world's leading social psychologist Sharif and his research assistant, because Sharif's experiment did not work with him.
Sharif decided to try the experiment again to confirm his theory! This is the famous Robles Cave Experiment.
Normal summer camp activities
Robles Cave Experimental Camp
Sharif still had a lot of grants for the first experiment, but after his failure, he felt his reputation was under threat.
This time, he was going to separate the two groups of children from the start so they wouldn't form a friendship like the Middle Grove experiment. The two groups are rattlesnakes and eagles.
Neither group realized the other for the first two days. They connect with their own teams through standard camping activities such as hiking and swimming.
When the two groups seemed to form a solid foundation, Sharif and his team began the "competition phase" of the Robles Cave experiment.
The two groups were introduced to each other and a series of competing activities were arranged. There will be tug-of-war games, baseball games, and so on. In addition, prizes will be awarded, prizes will be threatened and losers will not receive a prize of consolation. The Diamondbacks announced they would be champions and occupied the baseball field for training.
They hung the flag on the pitch and told the eagles it was best not to go near.
Flags full of provocation
Conflict performance
Staff began to intervene more aggressively in the Robes Cave experiment. They deliberately created conflict, once deliberately arranging for one group to be late for lunch and having another group eat all the food.
At first, the conflict between the boys was nothing more than verbal ridicule and verbal abuse. But under the careful guidance of Sharif and his staff, it soon turned into physical contact.
The Eagles got matches and they burned off their opponents' flags. In retaliation, the Rattlesnake broke into the Eagle's hut, destroyed it, and stole their belongings.
The conflict escalated into violence, so the two groups had to be separated for two days.
Now that the children hate each other, Sharif decides it's time to prove his theory correct, and it's time for them to get back together. So he turned off drinking water.
Rattlesnake and eagle set out to find a water tank on the mountain. Now the only water they have is water in the canteen. By the time they reached the tank, hot and thirsty, the two groups had begun to merge.
Robles Cave Experiment Results and Legacy
The campers found the valve of the water tank, but the valve was covered with rocks, so they united and removed the stones as soon as possible.
This makes Sharif very happy, because it is consistent with his theory: these organizations will compete for limited resources, but in the face of common threats, they will unite.
Although the experiment was both ethically and procedurally dubious, Sharif seemed to have gotten the results he wanted, and both his theory and the study itself received widespread publicity.
However, professionals have been skeptical of the value of his experiments, and in time they have used the textbooks of his research!
60 years of development in the field have led modern psychologists to make many criticisms of this research. They argue that Sharif's experiment was meant to demonstrate his theory, not to prove or refute it.
In addition, the boys were both middle-class and white, both from Protestant and parental backgrounds. Such studies do not reflect real life and are considered limited.
There are also ethical issues with cheating on participants: neither the children nor their parents know what they agree to, and in many cases, the boys are either left unattended or at risk.
Despite these doubts, the Robes Cave experiment left a legacy — especially on the participants.
Doug Griset, a now-grown camper, sarcastically recalls, "I wasn't traumatized by experimentation, but I don't like lakes or camps, huts or tents now."
Although such experiments are bold, it can be said that there is no one before or after the ancients, but the experiment caused permanent trauma to the child's psychology. But I think this experiment must have provided inspiration for many novelists.
This astonishing result is said to have inspired the creation of The Lord of the Flies just one year later. I think Mr. Liu Cixin must have referred to this experiment when he created "Supernova Era", or read "The Lord of the Flies".
Quick read
1. In order to confirm his theory, Sharif experimented in the field with 22 12-year-old boys in the summer of 1954.
2. Robles Cave Experiment: It is a field experiment to study group conflict and aggression
3, the first experiment, the Middle Grove Experimental Camp, because the children established a friendship at the beginning, resulting in the failure of the experiment.
4. The second experiment, the Robles Cave Experiment, in which the children clash under Sharif's arrangement and unite under the arrangement.
5 or 60 years later, people do not think that the experiment is correct, and that the experiment is very immoral, leaving permanent trauma to the children who are subject to the experiment.
6. It provides creative inspiration for novelists.