Contents
Summer 1954, Robbers Cave State Park in Oklahoma. Twenty-two boys aged eleven and twelve spend three weeks at a summer camp. They do not know one another. Nor do they know that their counselors are researchers. The social psychologist Muzafer Sherif wants to find out how hostility between groups arises – and what dissolves it again. An example of the Team Principle of Direction.
Two Groups, Two Names
Situation
The boys are deliberately chosen to be alike: white, Protestant, middle-class, from two-parent families. For the first five to six days they live in two separate groups and at first know nothing of each other. The groups give themselves names, Rattlers and Eagles, and paint them on shirts and flags.
Connection to the team principle
Shared experiences and a shared name are enough to create a sense of “us.” That is not yet a problem. But it shows how quickly a group comes to define itself by who it is rather than by a task.
Competition Turns Neighbors into Opponents
Situation
Next comes a tournament lasting four to five days, with baseball and tug-of-war. The winners get a trophy, medals and pocketknives. The losers get nothing. Things turn ugly. The Eagles burn the Rattlers’ flag. The Rattlers ransack the Eagles’ cabin and take things. Counselors have to separate the brawling groups.
Connection to the team principle
Here the goals are set up against each other: whatever one group wins, the other loses. Within each group there is a strong shared goal. Together they are the opposite of a team. The same thing happens in organizations when departments compete for the same budget or the same bonus.
Proximity Alone Does Not Help
Situation
The researchers bring the two groups together without any competition. There are shared meals, a movie night, fireworks. The result: the get-togethers turn into occasions for name-calling and scuffles.
Connection to the team principle
This may be the most useful finding for leaders. Contact does not turn hostile groups into a team. A shared meal or a pleasant evening changes nothing as long as there is no goal both sides want.
Tasks No One Can Manage Alone
Situation
In the third phase, the researchers set tasks that affect both groups. The camp’s water supply fails. Both groups look for the fault and fix it together. A film costs 15 dollars to rent. The groups pool their money, 3.50 dollars each, and the camp pays the rest. The truck bringing the food won’t start. The boys tow it together to get it started – using the rope from the tug-of-war. Muzafer Sherif reports in 1958 that derogatory stereotypes about the other group fall from 21–36.5% to 1.5–6%. In the end the boys want to ride home together on one bus.
Connection to the team principle
Muzafer Sherif calls such tasks superordinate goals: both sides want them, and neither group can reach them alone. That is exactly what the Team Principle of Direction means. The goal ranks above belonging to the Rattlers or the Eagles. One detail matters: a single shared task was not enough. Only a whole series of them reduced the tension.
What the Critics Say
Situation
The Australian psychologist Gina Perry has gone through the archives and spoken with former participants. According to her, the counselors intervened heavily. They massaged the scores and let one side win on purpose. The water failure and the stalled truck were staged. An earlier attempt, in 1953 in Middle Grove, New York, had failed: the boys found recording equipment and notebooks, saw through the setup and turned against the counselors instead of against each other. Muzafer Sherif never published it. Today the study is considered ethically unacceptable: the children were deceived and had not given their consent.
Connection to the team principle
The experiment is therefore a vivid story, but not proof. It involved 22 boys from a single background, and the experimenters steered what happened. The failed 1953 attempt can even be read as confirmation: there, too, something shared united the boys – just not what the researchers had planned. That is an interpretation, not a finding of the study.
Key takeaways
Key Lessons
- Don’t expect miracles from team events. Proximity without a shared goal can even deepen divides.
- Check whether your team’s goals are set up against each other. Where one side’s gain is the other’s loss, no team emerges.
- Look for tasks that both sides want and neither can manage alone. That is the lever for departments that are at odds.
- Plan several such tasks. A single shared experience is not yet enough to turn the mood around.
- Don’t stage anything. The boys of 1953 saw through the experimenters – your team will see through you, too.
Summary
At Robbers Cave, boys who were strangers became two hostile groups within a few days. Shared meals and movie nights did nothing to change that. Only tasks that affected both sides and that neither could solve alone broke down the hostility. The study is open to methodological and ethical challenge and cannot serve as proof. As an image of the Team Principle of Direction, it remains powerful: a shared goal that ranks above one’s own group unites more than any amount of proximity.