Revisiting Robbers Cave: The easy spontaneity of intergroup conflict | Literally Psyched, Scientific American Blog Network: The groups themselves were highly similar. They’d been previously matched as closely possible for things like height and weight, athleticism and popularity outside of camp, previous camp experience and musicality, and so on. To an outside eye, they were just your typical kids arriving for a relaxing stay at summer camp.
In reality, they were no such thing. They were instead the subjects in what has since become one of the most famous studies in social psychology—specifically, the area devoted to intergroup relations: Muzafer Sherif’s Robbers Cave experiment. The goal of the study was multifold: to see how quickly group identity could become established among strangers, how fixed or flexible that identity was, how it would play out in competitive settings with other groups, and how the group conflict dynamic could be mitigated after the fact.