The Robbers Cave experiment: a psychological experiment worth considering in today’s divided society

If there’s a lesson worth learning from history, it’s that the course history has been mainly shaped by the struggle between competition and cooperation among human beings. And while competition is a feature common to most of other primitive species too, cooperation is only found in more cognitive advanced species — and it could explain why our species succeeded more than others.

A corollary of this lesson is that the sole purpose of any politician, political movement or ideology built around an ideological framework that stresses identity is to maximise consent and egoistically improve its own conditions by flirting with our primitive instincts towards competition, without bringing any good to the rest of the world. There’s not a single exception worth a mention in history. The trick has been known for at least two millennia (Roman’s used to call this strategy divide et impera, “split and rule”), and if there’s anything worth learning from history is that you shouldn’t trust anyone who stresses identity as a core feature of his/her rhetorics.

The Robbers Cave experiment run in Oklahoma in 1953 shed some significant light on how identity can be embraced to provide our species with a false sense of purpose, and how it can be leveraged to create deep artificial divisions among us that are hard to fix.

In the experiment 22 kids from similar backgrounds aged between 11 and 12 were selected for a…