Part of the Tribe: Race, Religion, and Nation
Scientists strive to understand the prevalence of “tribal” perceptions and feelings—about race, religion and nation.
Published November 18, 2005
By David Berreby
“These people will not assimilate here,” a resident of Baton Rouge recently told a reporter who asked about the flood of refugees from Hurricane Katrina. “They put up with the crime in New Orleans, and now it’s staring them in the face, but up here that’s not going to be tolerated. People are going to handle it individually if they have to. This is the South. We will take care of it.”
Familiar sentiments. But then, so are those of the New York City police inspector who, with some 300 other officers, left his comfortable routine to help total strangers in Louisiana. One reason, he said, was the way people from New Orleans had acted on September 11, 2001:
“They were there in the first 24 to 48 hours,” he said. “Not our request, they just came. They got on a bus and headed up. During 9/11 they were cooking gumbo and feeding us. So, when we got a request for Jefferson Parish, I think that is one of the reasons we came.”
Thinking “Tribally”
Both these men were thinking “tribally.” They spoke not of what “I” would do, but of what “we” would. And they did not talk about individual Joes and Janes from the Gulf Coast, but rather about “them.” Yet one man looked at strangers and saw a threat; another, looking at the same people, saw a debt.
What accounts for these perceptions? And, just as important, what explains their often unpredictable variation from person to person?
Researchers in neuroscience, evolutionary theory, anthropology, psychology, and sociology have been tackling this question. And they’ve found evidence that “tribal” perceptions and feelings—about race, religion and nation, as well as, in attenuated form, about the Yankees and college classmates and Star Trek—arise from a built-in mental faculty.
That may sound familiar, but the new view is not your grandfather’s theory of tribalism. Forget the zombie model of identity, which expects that all Muslims, or all women, or all Chinese people, must act in the same way, because of their membership in a category. Instead, recent work recognizes, as Lawrence A. Hirschfeld, a psychological anthropologist at New School University, has put it, that “anyone in any human society no matter how small scale, has a very large number of affiliations, allegiances and coalitions that can be invoked in anytime.”
The Rwanda Genocide
For example, one of the people convicted of war crimes in the aftermath of the Rwanda genocide was a Hutu nun, Sister Gertrude, who had called in a militia to massacre Tutsi refugees. She did not turn over her fellow nuns who were Tutsis. Had she been more of a Christian, and less of a Hutu militant, she would have not called in the murderers. Had she been less of a Christian, she would have let the Tutsi nuns perish too.
The important point is that all three choices—her own hideous compromise, or a more religious decision, or a more ethnically based one—were plausible. You could not have predicted her actions on the basis of “objective” facts about her identity. You would have had to know what was in her mind.
Nor is today’s model your father’s theory of “natural” drives to do evil. If we are not slaves of our identities, neither are we slaves of inflexible, unconscious instincts. Today’s research recognizes that human behavior is flexible and rooted in its context.
One American study found, for example, that people who receive pleasant news from an African-American physician are more likely to refer to him as “the doctor,” while those who hear that they have a problem are inclined to call him “the black guy.” And a thorough survey of mob violence around soccer matches in the Netherlands discovered that there is no “mob mentality” that takes over the minds of people in a riot. Except for a few violent brawlers, the people in those mobs behaved quite rationally.
“Like Us”
So when one person helps needy strangers, while another bars the door, we can’t explain their actions by positing a constant, unchanging, universal “fear of strangers,” or “crowd mentality,” or “death wish.”
If people aren’t the zombie slaves of our religions, genders, social classes, or other identities, nor bursting with automatic hate for anyone not “like us” (whatever “like us” means), then what’s really going on? How can people be simultaneously so flexible about identity and yet so steadfast—steadfast enough to die, or kill, for “our side?”
Much of the recent work on the problem has involved new techniques and technology: Careful experiments with toddlers, to see how they conceive of differences among social groups; MRI scans that show differences in how Americans perceive blacks and whites; blood tests that reveal how unhealthy it is to perceive yourself as a member of a supposedly “bad” kind.
Yet one of the most profound and revealing investigations of the problem, and one that informs work today in many fields, is not new. It was conducted more than 50 years ago, in the innocent precincts of a summer camp.
Making Tribes from Scratch
For 22 Oklahoma City fifth-graders in the summer of 1954, the offer must have sounded like a dream: Come spend three weeks in the Sans Bois mountains at a 200-acre campground with swimming holes, streams, canoes, baseball diamonds, campfires, caves, and snakes. Explore the woods where Jesse James’s gang hid out! Have cookouts! Play tug of war! Advance social psychology!
This last, not mentioned in the brochure, was why the University of Oklahoma picked up almost all the costs. The camp was actually an elaborate experiment. As the boys, all strangers, assembled their campfire universe, their counselors observed the birth, life, and death of tribal feelings.
This exercise was designed by Muzafer Sherif, a brilliant and eccentric social psychologist (and himself a refugee from identity-based violence—he had been nearly killed when Greek soldiers took his native Smyrna in 1919). He saw through the weakness of the zombie models, realizing that circumstance has a major role in our perceptions of where we and others belong on the map of human tribes. Circumstances can change, which is why racial politics in the United States today aren’t what they were in 1865. But circumstances often stay the same, which is why the same stereotypes can persist over generations.
Robbers Cave
To test this idea, Sherif needed to show that circumstances could create tribes, and tribal feeling—and then that a change in circumstances could change those perceptions. This was why he bused 22 boys from Oklahoma City schools to a campground in Robbers Cave State Park, in the Sans Bois mountains.
The boys arrived in two groups of 11 each, and each band had time to explore and claim some territory—a bunkhouse, a swimming hole, a ball field. Each gang soon decided it needed a name, and a symbol.
After supper on the sixth day of camp, after they’d stenciled their emblem on T-shirts, the first group, who now styled themselves “Rattlers,” learned they were not alone. They could hear other boys in the distance, playing on the ball field—boys who, also on their own, had invented folkways and given themselves a name: the Eagles.
The Rattlers and Eagles soon elaborated their differences. One boy’s impulse to jump in the creek with no suit made nude swimming the Eagle way. Another boy hurt his toe and didn’t mention it; that was enough to make “toughing it out” a Rattler custom. An hour or two with no swear words in the air was turned into the solemn belief that clean language was part of the essence of Eaglehood. Meanwhile, the Rattlers cursed a blue streak. That was the Rattler ethos, handed down, like Rattler emblems and Rattler songs, from the dawn of history (also known as the week before).
A Shared Goal
Once the boys had formed the tribes Sherif expected, he devoted week two of the camp to making them hate each other. This was, to put it mildly, not difficult. He simply set up a tournament of ball games, bean tosses, tug-of-war and other contests, with prizes for the team that won the most games.
Within a day or two, boys held their noses when they were near their enemies. They asked for separate but equal fireworks for the Fourth of July. On a written test to measure how their tribal feelings affected their perceptions, all the boys said their team tossed beanbags farther than they really had, while the other team covered less distance than it really had. One Rattler abruptly dropped his pencil in mid-test; he’d noticed it was Eagle brand.
The counselors had to keep a close eye on both cabins at night—both tribes went in for raids and counter-raids. And after the Eagles won the tournament, the Rattlers stole their prizes, and, in the ensuing confrontation, kids from both sides began punching each other and looking for rocks to throw. The experimenters had to step in to prevent real bloodshed.
At the beginning of week three, then, Sherif had an unlikely sounding task: to show that changing the circumstances of the boys’ lives would get them to drop the Rattler-Eagle divide.
Sherif’s method was to give the two warring cultures a shared goal, which demanded that they all perceive themselves as “in the same boat.” So he blocked the faucet leading from the camp’s one water tank. Both sides pitched in with tools and suggestions to unblock the spigot. Next came a movie. If the boys wanted to see Treasure Island, they would have to work out a way to pay for it.
Hostilities Diminished
After these challenges, hostility quickly diminished. For instance, the food fights gave way to a treaty. The two bands decided they would take turns going in to eat first—Rattlers for breakfast, Eagles for lunch, and so on.
Next, Sherif’s team took the groups on an overnight camping trip, and staged some more predicaments: a truck breakdown, food that needed to be unpacked and prepared, tents that arrived in a heap of canvas and poles that needed to be sorted. All these forced the boys to work on a common problem.
Then Sherif’s team staged another mechanical breakdown, so that only one truck was available to take the boys to the Arkansas state line, which they all wanted to see. This was a moment of truth. They could stay true to their Rattler and Eagle loyalties and make two separate 60-mile round trips. Or they could decide to go as one.
After a long debate, they chose to go as one group. On the way to Arkansas, the boys traded stories about the raids and fights, like veterans of a long-ago war. Slights and attacks that had made them furious before made them laugh and brag now. Then one boy started whistling. He chose a song bound to appeal past their Rattler and Eagle loyalties: “The Star Spangled Banner.”
Of course, most people don’t create tribal bonds from scratch. What might have happened if these white boys, who had been quick to use racial slurs, had found that half their new cabin mates were black? Sherif’s data could not speak to that. But someone else’s might.
Replicating the Robbers Cave Procedure
In 1963, Lutfy N. Diab, a dean and psychology professor at the American University in Beirut, tried to repeat the Robbers Cave procedure. He chose eight Christians and 10 Muslims. Not surprisingly, given the historic tensions between religious communities in Lebanon, fighting broke out between the two teams of campers, the Blue Ghosts and the Red Genies. After three Genies threatened a Ghost with knives stolen from the camp kitchen, Diab decided he had to break the camp up without reaching the reconciliation stage.
The striking fact about his camp, though, is that the fighting was not along religious lines. The Blue Ghosts consisted of five Muslims and four Christians; so did the Red Genies. The three Genies with the knives were all Christians, but so was their Blue Ghost victim. Fourteen of the 18 campers had come from fiercely religious schools, yet in the camp, separated from the outside world, when they could easily have chosen to see themselves as Christian versus Muslim, they chose instead Ghost versus Genie. It wasn’t what the boys were that governed; it was what they were doing.
As the zombie models of tribalism fade into history, researchers are elucidating the astonishing processes by which individual brains, which are constantly changing in response to their environments, somehow manage to create unchanging, long-lasting entities like nations, religions, races and other tribal groups. The new work depends a lot on recent technology and recent thinking. But it also owes a debt to Sherif and his pioneering summer camp.
