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Prejudice — a negative attitude toward the members of a group, held simply because they belong to that group — is one of the most consequential phenomena in social psychology, because it underwrites discrimination, conflict and, at its extreme, atrocity. The Edexcel Social Psychology topic requires an explanation of prejudice, and the first of the two the specification names is Realistic Conflict Theory (RCT), associated above all with Muzafer Sherif. RCT makes a bold, testable claim: intergroup hostility is not primarily a matter of individual personality or of mere group membership, but arises from real competition between groups for scarce or valued resources. When two groups must compete for something only one can win — territory, jobs, status, a trophy — hostility, negative stereotyping and discrimination follow; and, crucially, when the groups must instead cooperate toward a goal neither can achieve alone, that hostility can be reduced. This lesson builds the theory in full, examines Sherif et al.'s (1954/1961) Robbers Cave field experiment as its central evidence — its three stages and the superordinate goals that ultimately reduced conflict — and evaluates RCT rigorously.
Key Definition: Prejudice is a (usually negative) attitude toward individuals based solely on their membership of a particular group. It has a cognitive component (stereotyped beliefs), an affective component (hostile feelings) and a behavioural component (discrimination). Realistic Conflict Theory holds that intergroup hostility arises from real or perceived competition between groups for limited resources.
By the end of this lesson you should be able to:
Edexcel 9PS0 — Paper 1, Topic 1: Social Psychology. This lesson maps to the specification's requirement to explain prejudice, addressing Realistic Conflict Theory as an explanation of intergroup hostility and prejudice, and Sherif et al.'s (1954/1961) Robbers Cave field experiment as the classic evidence for it, including the role of competition in creating prejudice and of superordinate goals in reducing it.
Assessment Objectives exercised:
Connects to…
It is essential, and examinable, to keep three related terms distinct. Prejudice is an attitude — a pre-judgement of a person based on group membership. Stereotyping is the cognitive machinery that feeds it — a fixed, over-generalised belief about what members of a group are like. Discrimination is the behaviour — treating people unfairly because of their group membership. Attitudes do not always translate into behaviour (a prejudiced person may not discriminate if the social cost is high; a person may discriminate through unthinking convention without strong personal prejudice), which is why the three are analysed separately.
| Term | Nature | Component | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stereotype | Belief | Cognitive | "Members of group X are lazy" |
| Prejudice | Attitude/feeling | Affective | Disliking a person on sight because they belong to group X |
| Discrimination | Behaviour | Behavioural | Refusing to hire, serve or sit next to a member of group X |
RCT is primarily an explanation of how prejudice and hostility between groups arise, but because it was tested behaviourally (raids, name-calling, fights at Robbers Cave), it speaks to all three components at once. This is one of its strengths: it predicts a sequence — competition produces hostile attitudes, which produce discriminatory behaviour — that can be observed unfolding in real time.
RCT rests on a small number of linked propositions. The central engine is the concept of a zero-sum or negative interdependence between groups.
Key Definition: A zero-sum competition is one in which one group's gain is necessarily another group's loss — the total available is fixed, so what one side wins, the other must lose.
When two groups stand in positive interdependence (they must cooperate to succeed, and both benefit), relations tend to be harmonious. When they stand in negative interdependence — a zero-sum situation in which only one group can obtain the desired resource — the psychological consequence is competition, and competition breeds hostility. The resource in question need not be material: it can be territory, jobs, money, mates, status, prestige, or victory in a contest. What matters is that the groups perceive their goals to be incompatible, so that the success of one entails the failure of the other.
From this single mechanism RCT derives several predictions:
It is worth dwelling on the second prediction, because it is often overlooked and it is what makes RCT a theory of group dynamics rather than merely of individual attitudes. Sherif observed that competition does not simply produce hostility outward; it simultaneously reshapes the in-group inward. As the tournament progressed at Robbers Cave, each group's cohesion, morale and internal organisation tightened: leaders emerged or were replaced by those best suited to conflict, norms hardened around loyalty and toughness, and the boundary between "us" and "them" sharpened. This reciprocal movement — outward hostility and inward solidarity rising together — is a signature RCT prediction, and it matters for evaluation because it shows the theory explains not just dislike of the out-group but the whole pattern of intergroup relations: the way conflict manufactures tight, mobilised groups where before there were looser collections of individuals. It also has a sobering real-world corollary: leaders sometimes cultivate an external enemy precisely to consolidate their own group, because RCT's mechanism runs in reverse — manufacturing competition is a route to manufacturing loyalty.
A refinement worth noting is that RCT, in its later formulations, holds that it is perceived competition, not only actual competition, that drives hostility. Two groups need not truly stand in a zero-sum relation for prejudice to follow; it is enough that they believe their interests to be incompatible. This matters because it extends RCT's reach to conflicts where the "scarcity" is contested or even illusory — for example, hostility toward an immigrant group framed (often inaccurately) as "taking our jobs". The perception of threat to resources, whipped up by rhetoric, can generate the same hostility as genuine competition. This refinement strengthens the theory's real-world applicability but also complicates its testing, because perceptions are harder to manipulate cleanly than an actual prize-for-the-winners tournament.
Key Definition: A superordinate goal is a goal that is desired by two or more groups but can only be achieved through their cooperation, because no single group has the resources or power to attain it alone.
Superordinate goals reduce prejudice by converting negative interdependence into positive interdependence. When Group A can only get what it wants by working with Group B, the out-group is reframed: its members become allies whose success is now bound up with one's own, rather than rivals whose success comes at one's expense. Repeated cooperative contact toward shared goals dismantles the "us versus them" boundary because the boundary itself becomes maladaptive — the useful category is no longer "my group versus theirs" but "all of us, together, against the problem". Crucially, RCT predicts that a single cooperative episode is rarely enough: it is the accumulation of superordinate goals that steadily erodes hostility, because each success builds a little more of the shared "us".
graph TD
A["Two groups"] --> B{"Nature of<br/>interdependence?"}
B -->|"Negative / zero-sum<br/>(compete for scarce resource)"| C["Competition"]
B -->|"Positive<br/>(need each other for a<br/>superordinate goal)"| D["Cooperation"]
C --> E["Out-group hostility +<br/>in-group solidarity<br/>→ prejudice & discrimination"]
D --> F["Reframed as allies<br/>→ prejudice reduced"]
Sherif and colleagues conducted a series of field experiments in the American state of Oklahoma; the best-known, at Robbers Cave State Park, was run in 1954 and reported fully in 1961. It is a field experiment because it manipulated an independent variable (the introduction of competition, then of superordinate goals) in a genuine real-world setting — a summer camp — while the participants believed they were simply attending camp.
To test whether intergroup hostility could be created by competition between groups and subsequently reduced by requiring the groups to cooperate toward superordinate goals — that is, to test Realistic Conflict Theory experimentally.
For roughly a week, each group engaged in cooperative activities in isolation from the other — hiking, swimming, building, preparing meals. Each group spontaneously developed the features of a genuine social group: norms, a leadership hierarchy, shared jargon, and a group name (the Rattlers and the Eagles), which the boys stencilled onto flags and shirts. This stage established two real in-groups, each with its own identity, before any contact between them.
The two groups were now made aware of each other and brought together in a tournament of competitive games (baseball, tug-of-war, tent-pitching) with prizes for the winning group only (a trophy, medals, pocket-knives) and nothing for the losers — a textbook zero-sum structure. Hostility escalated rapidly and dramatically:
The competition alone — introduced between two groups of well-adjusted, randomly assigned, essentially identical boys — was sufficient to generate strong, behaviourally expressed prejudice within days. This is the study's central demonstration in support of RCT.
Sherif first tested whether simple contact would reduce the hostility: the groups were brought together for pleasant, non-competitive activities (shared meals, a film). This failed — the occasions became opportunities for further abuse and food-fights, an important finding that undercuts the naive "contact hypothesis" that mere proximity heals division.
Sherif then introduced a series of superordinate goals — problems that required both groups to cooperate:
| Superordinate goal | The staged problem | Cooperation required |
|---|---|---|
| The water shortage | The camp's water supply was "sabotaged"; the boys had to search the mile-long pipeline together to find and fix the fault | Both groups had to search and repair jointly |
| The stuck truck | The truck bringing food "broke down"; the boys used a tug-of-war rope to haul it up a hill | All the boys pulled together on the rope |
| The film hire | Both groups wanted to watch a film but neither had enough money; they had to pool their funds to hire it | Joint financial contribution |
No single cooperative task dissolved the hostility, but their cumulative effect did. Over repeated superordinate goals, friendships began to form across the group boundary, the derogatory stereotypes softened, and by the end the boys chose to travel home together on a single bus and the Rattlers spontaneously used their prize money to buy drinks for everyone. Intergroup hostility had been substantially reduced — exactly as RCT predicts once negative interdependence is replaced by positive interdependence.
Prejudice and intergroup hostility can be generated purely by competition for scarce resources between groups, independently of the participants' personalities, and can be reduced by superordinate goals that force cooperation. Mere contact is insufficient; it is the structure of interdependence between the groups that governs their relations. The findings provide strong field-experimental support for Realistic Conflict Theory.
A major strength of Robbers Cave is that it was a field experiment conducted in a naturalistic setting — a real summer camp, with real groups, real competition and real, behaviourally expressed hostility (raids, fights, a burned flag). Because the boys did not know they were being studied, their behaviour was spontaneous and free of the demand characteristics that dog laboratory research, giving the study high ecological validity and mundane realism. The prejudice observed was not a paper-and-pencil attitude score but genuine intergroup conflict unfolding in real time, which makes the demonstration unusually compelling. The trade-off, as ever with field experiments, is reduced control over extraneous variables — but the payoff in realism is exactly what a lab study of prejudice cannot buy.
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