The story of a Turkish-American social psychologist who devised experiments to reveal the sources of brutality.While conducting research in the Archives of the History of American Psychology, Australian psychologist Perry (Culture and Communication/Univ. of Melbourne; Behind the Shock Machine: The Untold Story of the Notorious Milgram Psychology Experiments, 2013) came across the papers of Muzafer Sherif (1906-1988), a noted psychologist who devoted his life to proving that tribal loyalty and peer pressure shape conflict and reconciliation. Sherif, Perry discovered, was a complicated, often abrasive man who could be demanding and, at times, charming; he pursued his work "with a singular focus and an apparently unshakeable faith in his own theory" about the cause of brutality. The contradictions of his personality intrigued the author, as did his experiments, in which young boys were brought to a specially designed summer camp, induced to form friendships, then goaded into competition with one another to foment hatred, and finally manipulated into cooperating to solve a common threat. Sherif and his researchers interacted with the boys in various roles, taking detailed notes. Reading that material, Perry became disturbed about the ethics of Sherif's work, especially the 1954 Robbers Cave experiment. There, at an Oklahoma state park, about two dozen boys were assembled "in an alien environment, surrounded by adults whose behavior puzzled and sometimes troubled them." As one researcher admitted to the author, the staff overtly "engineered events and set up misinformation so that one group would get angry with the other and retaliate." Perry interviewed several men who had been at the camp as children to discover how they had been affected, and she traveled to Turkey to investigate Sherif's youth for insight into his obsession with proving that brutality was not inherent in human nature but instead a product of social interaction. In grounding Sherif's work in historical and biographical context, the author offers insight into how an experimenter shapes findings and raises salient questions about the ethical implications of psychological research.A cleareyed assessment of a significant chapter in the history of psychology and social science.

Using archival notes and new interviews, Australian psychologist Perry (Behind the Shock Machine) looks at a notable 1954 experiment in Oklahoma-s remote Robbers Cave State Park in her unsatisfying history. After recruiting almost two dozen 11-year-old boys and dividing them into two competitive teams, social psychologist Muzafer Sherif and his team showed how, over the course of a few weeks, friendships could devolve into intense, sometimes violent, antagonism. Conversely, the boys would drop their antagonism and reunite when facing a common challenge. Perry uncovers some deep flaws in the experiment, which she calls a -choreographed enactment,- with the staff sometimes acting as -agents provocateurs.- Perry also spends time with some of the surviving subjects, now in their 70s, exploring whether any psychological effects remain. However, she drops this line of inquiry abruptly to devote her book-s last third to Sherif-s biography, which Perry hypothesizes might have influenced his -tribal war and peace research-: as a boy in the early 1920s, he witnessed particularly brutal violence between Greeks and Turks in the Anatolian town where he grew up. This seems plausible, but Perry does not really anchor it in Sherif-s own writings. Her long profile of him, and description of his experiment, will likely remain unsurpassed, but she never clearly establishes the Robbers Cave study-s long-term significance. (Apr.)