Author: Miss Cellania / Source: Neatorama
Harvard psychologist Muzafer Sherif was fascinated by group dynamics, and wanted to experiment with social psychology. In 1953, a year before William Golding’s Lord of the Flies was published, he set up a summer camp called Middle Grove for 11-year-old boys and manipulated them into forming two opposing groups.
He set them up to hate each other, and then planned a fake emergency to see if they would cooperate to overcome it.Despite his pretence of leaving the 11-year-olds to their own devices, Sherif and his research staff, posing as camp counsellors and caretakers, interfered to engineer the result they wanted. He believed he could make the two groups, called the Pythons and the Panthers, sworn enemies via a series of well-timed “frustration exercises”. These included his assistants stealing items of clothing from the boys’ tents and cutting the rope that held up the Panthers’ homemade flag, in the hope they would…
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