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Henri Tajfel didn’t actually set out to prove that teenagers would identify with groups formed randomly. His purpose was different: He wanted to understand what caused people to play favorites with their own group (psychologists call this “in-group bias”). To accomplish this goal, Tajfel decided to begin with experimental groups that were so insignificant that their members couldn’t possibly feel the need to show favoritism. He was surprised when his first random group and every subsequent group played favorites. Tajfel’s unanticipated finding is generally hailed across fields as a seminal discovery.

More recent research has argued that people’s trust in their groups doesn’t necessarily mean they dislike outsiders, only that they may discriminate against them. Students may become cafeteria fringe merely because they don’t happen to fit neatly into groups that have already formed. People assign more favorable characteristics to their own group and assume that their groupmates’ beliefs are more similar to theirs than are outsiders’ beliefs. They usually process information about outsiders in simplistic ways, then bond over their generalized stereotypes of non-group members.

Not all groups experience in-group bias the same way. High-status groups (populars, for instance) display more group favoritism, evaluate their group more positively, and critique other groups more negatively than do low-status groups. Members of low-status groups, meanwhile, might attempt to feel better about their identity by copying high-status groups (such as wannabes who dress like populars); using the social creativity strategy, meaning they find different factors on which to base their comparisons (“They will work for me someday”); or comparing themselves to other low-status groups, much like Eli’s list of nerd subspecies.

Group favoritism seems intuitive, but how does it lead to clique warfare? In 1954, social psychologist Muzafer Sherif invited twenty-two eleven-year-old boys to a three-week summer camp in Robbers Cave State Park, Oklahoma. The boys were well-adjusted, middle class, Protestant Oklahoma City residents with similar IQs and no history of social or academic problems. Sherif randomly divided the boys into two groups and positioned them at opposite ends of a 200-acre campground outfitted with hidden tape recorders. Sherif’s team of observers served as camp staff. Sherif himself, disguised as the camp janitor, watched how events played out.

For the first several days of camp, the two groups were unaware of each other. The boys instinctively formed group identities, naming their groups the Eagles and the Rattlers. Toward the end of the first week, the camp staff told each group that there was another set of boys on the campgrounds. When the Eagles heard the faraway sounds of the Rattler boys at play, one of the Eagles, knowing nothing about the Rattlers, called them “nigger campers.” Each group requested to compete against the other.

During the second week, Sherif set up a tournament of competitions—baseball, touch football, tug-of-war, tent-pitching—in which only the winning group received rewards. Tensions between the groups skyrocketed. They sang derisive songs and continued the name-calling. The Eagles set fire to the Rattlers camp flag. Camp staff forcibly broke up fistfights. The Rattlers, decked out commando-style, raided the Eagles’ cabin, ripping through mosquito netting and stealing or vandalizing some of the Eagles’ possessions. Adults had to prevent the Eagles from attacking the Rattlers with rocks.

Tajfel’s paintings experiment illustrated that random, meaningless groups can adopt an us-versus-them mentality. Sherif’s Robbers Cave experiment demonstrated that those groups can quickly turn hostile, even when they haven’t met face-to-face, and that in a competitive environment the hostility can escalate. Now step up the intensity of both of those scenarios: Nonrandom groups formed exclusively and bonded over time are placed in a setting in which they repeatedly must compete for