Groups in Harmony and Tension: An Integration of Studies on Intergroup Relations

The book argues that intergroup harmony and tension are determined by the functional relationship between groups' goals, not by individual prejudice, personality, or inherent aggressiveness. When groups pursue mutually exclusive goals, competition produces hostility and simultaneously increases in-group solidarity; when they face superordinate goals requiring joint effort, cooperation becomes possible. This rejects explanations that locate the source of intergroup conflict in individual psychology, such as the authoritarian personality or innate ethnocentrism. The Sherifs instead treat groups as real social units with their own norms and identities, and intergroup relations as a distinct level of analysis that cannot be reduced to the psychology of individual members.

Groups in Harmony and Tension occupies the theoretical middle position in the Sherifs' career. The Psychology of Social Norms (1936) established that norms emerge through interaction under ambiguity and become internal anchors. Groups in Harmony and Tension (1953) extends that logic to relations between groups, arguing that group identities, norms, and mutual attitudes are shaped by the goal structure of intergroup interaction. It was published just before the 1954 Robbers Cave summer camp, which then provided the dramatic empirical demonstration of the framework. The 1961 Robbers Cave monograph and the 1966 Group Conflict and Cooperation are the mature statements; the 1953 book is the theoretical bridge that made them possible.

The book develops the distinction between mutually exclusive and superordinate goals, the analysis of in-group solidarity as a product of intergroup competition, and the treatment of group norms and identities as real social facts rather than aggregations of individual attitudes. These concepts became central to realistic conflict theory and to the applied literature on conflict resolution. The book also prefigures the Sherifs' later social judgment framework by treating attitudes as anchored in group membership and ego-involvement. Gordon Allport's The Nature of Prejudice, published a year later in 1954, drew on related ideas while emphasizing the conditions under which intergroup contact could reduce prejudice, making the two books complementary rather than rivalrous.

Allport's contact hypothesis, developed in The Nature of Prejudice (1954), argues that intergroup prejudice can be reduced through positive contact under specified conditions: equal status, common goals, cooperation, and institutional support. The Sherifs' framework overlaps with Allport's emphasis on common goals but places more weight on the goal structure itself as the primary determinant of intergroup attitudes. Where Allport focused on the conditions that make contact effective, the Sherifs argued that competition for scarce goals is sufficient to generate hostility and that superordinate goals are necessary to reverse it. The two frameworks are often taught together: Allport specifies the conditions for successful contact, while the Sherifs explain why contact without superordinate goals can intensify hostility rather than reduce it.

A frequent misreading treats the book as claiming that intergroup hostility is inevitable once groups form. In fact, the Sherifs argue that the goal relationship determines the outcome: groups whose goals are independent or complementary can coexist without hostility, and groups facing superordinate goals can cooperate even after a history of conflict. Hostility is a product of specific structural conditions, not of group formation as such. This distinction matters because it makes conflict remediable through changes in the goal structure rather than requiring the elimination of groups or the reform of individual personalities. The book is therefore more optimistic than it is sometimes taken to be, and its practical implications point toward shared tasks rather than toward assimilation.

The core claim that competition over scarce goals generates intergroup hostility has held up well and remains a standard finding in social psychology. The concept of superordinate goals is widely used in conflict-resolution research and practice. However, social identity theory, developed by Henri Tajfel and John Turner in the 1970s, showed that mere categorization into groups can produce in-group favoritism even without resource competition—a finding that complicates the Sherifs' emphasis on goal structure as the primary determinant. Later research also identified individual differences and situational factors that moderate the competition-hostility link. The book is now read as a foundational statement rather than a complete theory, but its central insight remains influential.