Let me tell you about Robber's Cave. In 1954,
a group of 11 boys, all about 12 years old, were invited to a special summer camp in the
deep woods of southeastern Oklahoma, at a place called Robber's Cave State Park. None
of the boys knew each other, although they all came from similar backgrounds. They spent
their days bonding over things like games and swimming and treasure hunts, and in no
time, they formed a tight friendly group. They even came up with a name for themselves:
the Rattlers. But soon they began to notice something. No,
not a guy in the woods with a hockey mask, there was another group of boys also 11 of
them, also the same age, that had been staying at the other end of the park the whole time.
The Rattlers never interacted with these other boys, so they didn't know that those kids
were also spending time bonding over games and swimming and treasure hunts, and that
they'd come up with a name for themselves, too: the Eagles. But the Rattlers didn't like
the look of the Eagles, oh, no, they didn't like them using their baseball diamond or
their dining hall. And the feeling was mutual. It didn't take
long for each group to start complaining to the camp's counselors about the other gang,
and eventually, they both said that they wanted to set up a contest to determine once and
for all which group was better. The counselors were only too happy to comply, because as
I'm sure you've figured out by now, those counselors were actually researchers. The man who set up what would be remembered
as the Robber's Cave Experiment was Turkish American social psychologist Muzafer Sherif.
He was interested in what it would take for rivals to overcome their differences and resolve
their conflicts. Specifically, Sherif wanted to test something called Realistic Conflict
Theory. He hypothesized that conflict happens when you combine negative prejudices with
competition over resources, and the boys at Robber's Cave were well on their way to proving
him right. Over the next couple of days, the Rattlers
and the Eagles competed against each other for prizes in a series of games, like tug-of-war
and foot races, and soon, what started as your basic trash talking and taunting and
name-calling morphed into fist-fights, thefts, and raids on each others' cabins. But then
their dynamics changed or were changed for them. After the games were over, the researchers
integrated the groups and gave the kids shared goals that they could only achieve through
cooperation. The tide quickly turned. All 22 boys worked together to move a stalled
truck that was carrying their food, they took care of a partially felled tree that was deemed
a danger to the camp, they collaborated in setting up tents, even though they weren't
given complete sets of equipment. While isolation and competition made enemies of the strangers, shared
goals and cooperation turned enemies into friends. Over the past 39 weeks, we've learned a lot
about ourselves, our emotions and our personalities, how our minds can get sick, how we can help
them get well again, why we can do vicious things and then turn around and act like heroes.
So maybe it's fitting that we wrap up this course by looking at a couple of opposing
forces that some consider the very definition of human nature: aggression and altruism.
Conflict and cooperation. You might think of it as the psychology of war and peace, or simply,
what we can all learn from a bunch of 12 year olds. In psychology, aggression is defined as "behavior
intended to hurt or destroy someone, something, or even yourself." People aggress, as psychologists
say, in all kinds of ways, verbally, emotionally, and physically, and for lots of different
reasons: out of anger, to assert dominance, or as a response to fear. But that's just
a glimpse into why someone might become aggressive. Where does the aggression actually come from? Like a lot of behaviors we've talked about
it, it seems to emerge from that familiar combination of biological factors, like genetic,
neurological, and biochemical influences, and our environment and experience. In terms
of genetic influences, studies of twins, and yes, Crash Course Psychology might have been
called Crash Course Studies of Twins, showed that if one identical twin has a violent temper,
often the other one does, too, but fraternal twins are much less likely to be so similar. Neurologically speaking, no single area of
the brain controls aggression, but certain areas like the limbic system do appear to
facilitate it. Research on violence and criminality has also revealed a link between aggression
and diminished activity in the frontal lobes, which play a vital role in impulse control. And finally, our aggressiveness can be influenced
by our own biochemistry, hormones like testosterone and glucocorticoids and pheromones have all
been implicated in animal models of aggression. It's a little trickier in humans, it's a lot
trickier in humans, but it's highly likely that our hormones are intimately linked with
feeling and showing aggression. Obviously, aggression isn't just about biology.
Psychological and cultural factors also play an important role, as does the power of the
situation. For example, there's the Frustration-Aggression Hypothesis, the simple idea that people become
aggressive when they're blocked from reaching a goal. To demonstrate, consider the not-very
aggressive sport of baseball. There's a study that analyzed 44 years worth of baseball stats,
and focused on the more than 27,000 incidents when a pitcher hit a batter with a ball. It
turned out that this was most likely to occur if the pitcher was frustrated by a recent
home run or if one of his own teammates had been hit by a pitch in the previous inning. But we also learn aggression by watching others.
Like, if you grew up watching your parents throw popcorn and jeering lewdly at their
most hated soccer team, you might have learned something from their behavior. So combine
all of those biological factors and funnel them through a particular person with a particular
history in a particular situation, and you can begin to see how aggression can have many
roots that grow together. Thankfully, though, humans are more than their
bad tempers. While some things in people will leave us annoyed and angry, others breed friendship
and affection. So yes, there are positive topics in social psychology, like altruism,
our selfless, even self-sacrificing regard for the welfare of others. This could be something
as simple as jumpstarting a stranger's car or as heroic as running into a burning building
to save someone. But if being altruistic is so awesome, why aren't we all that way all
the time? Or maybe the better question is, why do we ever do anything selfless, like,
what's in it for us? In the late 1960s, social psychologists Bibb
Latane and John Darley conducted a series of experiments examining when and why we help
others. In one experiment, they placed a subject in a room, sometimes alone, sometimes with
two other subjects, and sometimes with two actors posing as subjects. Then, they simulated
an emergency by filling the room with smoke and waited to see if the subject would do
anything to alert the others or help themselves. If the subject was alone, they'd report the
smoke 75% of the time. But subjects in a group of three only spoke up 38% of the time. And
when they were stuck in the room with two oblivious actors, only 10% of the participants
said anything to the others. Darley and Latane found that people typically helped others
only if they noticed the incident, interpreted it as an emergency, and then finally, assumed
responsibility, and all of these things were much more likely to occur if a person was
alone, while the presence of others deterred the person from helping. This kind of diffusion of responsibility referred
to as the bystander effect, can weaken our instinct for altruism. The bystander effect
is a bit like the concept of social loafing that we talked about. If you're around other
people, it's easier to think that someone else is going to pick up the slack or in this
case, come to the rescue. When people do decide to help others, they
may do it for a number of reasons. One perspective is that we tend to help others mainly out
of self-interest. By this thinking, helping really isn't altruistic at all, and instead,
our actions boil down to a sort of cost-benefit analysis. Like, maybe we'd turn in a lost
wallet because we're hoping for a reward or we pitch in on a project at work because we
think we'll get recognized and promoted by our bosses. Social psychologists contextualize
these kinds of examples in the broader theory of social exchange. When it comes to doing
things for other people, we're always trying to maximize our personal rewards while minimizing
our costs. But social exchange doesn't have to be as selfish as that, it can also mean
that we act altruistically because we expect that the people we help will go on to help
others, so if we give someone a hand changing a tire, maybe they'll stop next time they
see someone else, maybe even us, broken down on the side of the road. You might know this
concept, sometimes it's called the norm of reciprocity, sometimes it's called paying
it forward. And then there's the social responsibility
norm, which is the simple expectation that people will help those who depend on them,
like any parent can expect to give more help than they're going to receive from young children.
That's just part of being a parent. Naturally, the world would be a delightful place if altruism
were the standard for human behavior, but then, psychology wouldn't be nearly so interesting. In some ways, you might say that what fuels
conflict is the opposite of altruism: self-interest. Social psychologists view conflict as any
perceived incompatibility of actions, goals, or ideas. That could mean two nations fighting
over a border, sparring religious or political groups, or you and your boo fighting over
whose turn it is to do the dishes. And in a weird conundrum of human behavior
a lot of conflicts arise from what psychologists call "a social trap," where people act in
their own short term self-interest, even though it takes a toll on the larger group and on
themselves over the long-term. You see this kind of thing all the time on an individual
scale, like in a crime movie, when a criminal just betrays all of his criminal friends to
get the big payout, it doesn't turn out very well for him in the end. But on a larger scale,
you can find social traps taking their toll on the environment, like when we poach elephants
to sell their ivory or cut down old growth forests to make a quick buck in the lumber
market. Either way, when self-interest succeeds in wrecking the collective interest by, say,
depleting some limited resource, it becomes easy to start viewing our neighbors as competitors,
taking us right back to the ingroup vs. outgroup mindset that we all know causes big problems. So as long as there's self interest, there's
gonna be conflict. But before you get all down on humanity, remember
those Robber's Cave boys. They were ready to go full-on Lord of the Flies before shared
goals forced them to cooperate and ultimately, make peace. The power of cooperation to make
friends of former enemies is one of the most hopeful areas of psychological research. If
greed and self-interest can destroy the world, perhaps cooperation can save it. Today, you learned about the Robber's Cave
experiment and what it taught us about realistic conflict theory and how shared goals can overcome
conflict. We looked at the physical and environmental triggers of aggression, and the frustration-aggression
hypothesis. You also learned about altruism, the bystander effect, and when we are more
or less likely to help a person in need, and also about the social exchange theory, the
reciprocity norm, the social responsibility norm, and social traps. Thanks for watching, especially to all of
our Subbable subscribers who make Crash Course possible. To find out how you can become a
supporter, just go to Subbable.com, and please remember to go to YouTube.com/CrashCourse
and subscribe for more future Crash Courses in the future. This episode was written by Kathleen Yale,
edited by Blake de Pastino, and our consultant is Dr. Ranjit Bhagwat. Our director and editor
is Nicholas Jenkins, the script supervisor and sound designer is Michael Aranda, and
the graphics team is Thought Cafe.