After World War II there was tremendous urgency around finding explanations for what happened in Germany. How could a modern society lose itself in hate and violence, committing genocide on a scale and efficiency unimagined before? One of those who attempted to answer that question was Muzafer Sherif. To do so, he endeavored to explore how a group forms cohesion and comes to oppose and even hate another group and discover if they could be brought back together. It all sounds so noble until you realize the group he is experimenting on are twelve-year-old boys, isolating them at summer camps where his counselors incited competition and rivalry to create division. This is all explored in great detail in Gina Perry’s The Lost Boys.

The history of medicine and psychology is full of experiments that baffle a modern person, wondering how was this allowed to happen, but then I wonder what we are allowing to happen now. I can understand the importance of understanding how we form distinct groups and how in-group and out-group rivalries can lead us to strategies to make a more cooperative and kinder world. Perry does an excellent job of rooting Sherif’s passion for exploring this in his past experience in the volatile history of Turkey during the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of Ataturk.

The experiments are recounted in fascinating detail, drawing from recordings and notes from the experiments. Hidden microphones captured so much more. The assistants who functioned as camp staff wrote detailed daily reports that revealed far more than they may have realized as they described the same situations very differently. Perry is painstaking in demonstrating that perhaps the real experiment should have been the process of the counselors forming groups and clashing and coming together. The experiments took place with two groups of children, the final one at Robbers Cave in Oklahoma which give them their name, The Robbers Cave Experiment.

The Lost Boys is an extraordinary book. Perry has access to audio recordings of the experiment, reports, and the writings of Sherif to go through to create a history of extraordinary immediacy. Her analysis of Sherif’s scientific process benefits from a distance, seeing revelations that Sherif and his staff were too close to see. It was enthralling and appalling at the same time. I thought Perry’s exploration of his youth in Turkey was weaker, in part because she seemed too diffident about what happened in Turkey. She describes the expulsion of the Armenians and honestly reports they were marched into the desert and killed, but doesn’t use the word genocide. It was a weakness that asserted itself in Turkey where she was reluctant to ask questions about Sherif for fear of offending the government. However, other than that, I thought the book was excellent.

I received a review copy of The Lost Boys from the publisher. It will be released on April 2nd.

The Lost Boys at Scribe Publications via Consortium Book Sales and Distribution
Gina Perry author site

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