Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life.

In the time it takes to get to work.

I'm Keith Simon.

If you want to understand what is happening in our country, and to some extent the American Church,

it helps to understand what happened in 1954 in Robbers Cave, a state park in Oklahoma.

An academic psychologist named Missouri Sharif conducted a social experiment designed to discover

how competition affects the way groups of people interact with each other. So here's what he did.

He took two identical groups of fifth grade boys to the state park, but neither group

knew the other was there. So by themselves, each group hung out and played games. Then he told

them that there was another group of boys their age at the state park, and he asked them if they

wanted to compete against that other group. Each group of boys came up with their own names. One

called themselves the Eagles,

and the other called themselves the rattlers. It sounds just like fifth grade boys, doesn't it?

The psychologist disguised themselves as camp counselors, and they kept score between the teams, but

they kind of artificially rigged it so that the score was always close. It kind of kept the pressure

on the boys. And how did fifth grade

boys respond? Well, like you would expect. They started calling each other names. They would have

raids at night where they got into the other person's camp and tried to make a mess. They threw rocks

at each other. They accused each other of cheating. The Eagles stole the Rattler's flag and they burned it. And so

the Rattlers stole the pants of one of the Eagles leaders. They painted them orange and then flew the

pants up as their new flag. One of the things the psychologists noticed is that the team started

to make up stories about the bad things the other teams did, even though they hadn't really done

...