Day 55

Ironically, Survivor is not the first time that strangers have been placed in a novel environment, split into "tribes" and then told to work together within the tribe and against the other tribe and then ultimately "merged".

This actually first occurred in the Robber Cave Study.

These are some excerpts from what I read up on it: 

Muzafer Sherif is a famous social psychologist important to the psychological understanding of groups and its members.  His main contribution is known as Realistic Conflict Theory, and accounts for group conflict, negative prejudices, and stereotypes as being the result of competition between groups for desired resources.

The field experiment involved two groups of twelve-year-old boys at Robber’s Cave State Park, Oklahoma, America.

The twenty-two boys in the study were unknown to each other and all from white middle-class backgrounds.  They all shared a Protestant, two-parent background. None of the boys knew each other prior to the study. The boys were randomly assigned to one of two groups, although neither was aware of the other’s existence. 

At the camp the groups were kept separate from each other and were encouraged to bond as two individual groups through the pursuit of common goals that required co-operative discussion, planning and execution. During this first phase, the groups did not know of the other group's existence. The boys developed an attachment to their groups throughout the first week of the camp, quickly establishing their own cultures and group norms, by doing various activities together like hiking, swimming, etc. 

Sherif now arranged the Competition Stage where friction between the groups was to occur over the next 4-6 days. In this phase it was intended to bring the two groups into competition with each other in conditions that would create frustration between them. A series of competitive activities (e.g. baseball, tug-of-war etc.) were arranged with a trophy being awarded on the basis of accumulated team score. 

At first, the prejudice against the other team was only verbally expressed, such as taunting or name-calling. As the competition wore on, this expression took a more direct route. One group burned the other's flag. Then the next day, the second group ransacked the first's cabin, overturned beds, and stole private property. The groups became so aggressive with each other that the researchers had to physically separate them.

During the subsequent two-day cooling off period, the boys listed features of the two groups. The boys tended to characterize their own in-group in very favorable terms, and the other out-group in very unfavorable terms.

Keep in mind that the participants in this study were well-adjusted boys, not street gang members. This study clearly shows that conflict between groups can trigger prejudice attitudes and discriminatory behavior. This experiment confirmed Sherif's realistic conflict theory.

This could help build upon the theory of forming an in-group on Survivor or targeting those seen as an out-group. Strong players would make similarities between themselves and the people they want in their alliance to build a stronger relationship, even if those similarities are completely arbitrary.