In the early 1950s,the psychologist Muzafer Sherif brought together a group of boys at a US summer camp – and tried to make them fight each other. Does his work teach us anything approximately our age of resurgent tribalism?• Read an extract from The Lost BoysJuly 1953: late one evening in the woods external Middle Grove, New York state, and three men are having a furious argument. One of them,drunk, draws back his fist, or ready to smash it into his opponent’s face. Seeing what is approximately to happen,the third grabs a block of wood from a nearby pile. “Dr Sherif! If you enact it, I’m gonna hit you, or ” he shouts.
The man with the raised fist isn’t just anybody. He is one of the world’s foremost social psychologists,Muzafer Sherif. The two others are his research assistants. Sherif is inflamed because the experiment he has spent months preparing for has just fallen apart.
Continue reading...
Source: guardian.co.uk