Textbook accounts of Muzafer Sherif’s Robbers Cave experiment put Sherif front and centre of the story. But the stories of famous psychological experiments often ignore the team behind the experimenter – those staff, students and family members – who had an important role in making it happen. And Sherif’s Robbers Cave experiment is no exception.
The name OJ Harvey appears on the cover of the book about the experiments along with three other co-authors, including Sherif’s wife, Carolyn Wood Sherif. But you wouldn’t know from reading the book or any of the other popular descriptions of the experiment that it was actually Harvey who was in charge of Sherif’s most famous research.
OJ Harvey was a modest man. He told me several times that he was in no way big noting himself when he said he ran the Robbers Cave experiment. And he seemed uncomfortable at the prospect that he might appear to have what he called ‘a big head’. Yet there was no doubt about it. Muzafer Sherif could never have pulled it off without OJ Harvey in the lead role.
Harvey, a 27 year old student, worked with Sherif on an earlier version of the experiment in Middle Grove in Connecticut in 1953. OJ described how Sherif, intent on fanning conflict between the two groups of 11 year old boys, became increasingly frustrated at the boys reluctance to fight. Finally, one of the other staff, Marvin Sussmann, pulled down one group’s tent in the hope that one group would blame the other and all hell would break loose. But Sussmann’s tactic backfired. The boys turned on the staff. Sherif, acknowledging the experiment a failure, called it off.
Sherif blamed Sussmann but OJ didn’t. Neither did Herbert Kelman, who had been invited along to the experiment to be its ‘scientific conscience.’ Both acknowledged that Sherif was pressuring his team to get results and Sussmann no doubt thought that he was doing the right thing in trying to bring conflict to a head.
After the camp had been dismantled and the boys were sent home, OJ and his friend Jack White sat with Sherif on a log to ‘lick their wounds’ and talk about what went wrong. Eventually talk turned to the future and trying the experiment one last time. Sherif had only a small amount of grant money left, enough for a third and final attempt. But White and Harvey had other plans. They would only do it again if someone less mercurial was in charge. And that was OJ Harvey.
Sherif agreed to turn over his next experiment to his young protege. And later in his life he wrote to OJ to tell him how it had been the right decision and how grateful he was. In a 1975 letter he told OJ:
The more I think about [the Robbers Cave experiment] the more I realize how much this operationalization owes to you. Without your utmost participation, your resourcefulness, sound judgments and down-to-earth arrangements it couldn’t possibly be carried through to its culmination. I just wanted to convey this strong feeling and my gratitude to you.
They had lost touch in the intervening years and OJ was moved by Sherif’s unexpected letter. But it was far more than a thank you note. It was the beginning of a process that Sherif set in train before he died. By acknowledging OJ’s crucial role, Sherif was bringing forth someone who for so long had stood in his shadow.
His letter was a chance to set the record straight. In paying tribute to OJ’s pivotal role, Sherif also acknowledged that OJ been overlooked for too long. I think it was this, more than anything, that moved OJ Harvey. Finally he could take his place in the retelling of the story of the Robbers Cave experiment.
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