This prediction is based on several decades of research that my colleagues and I undertook at the University of Oxford to determine what makes people fight and die for their group. We use a variety of methods, including interviews, surveys and psychological experiments, to collect data from a wide range of groups, such as tribal warriors, armed insurgents, terrorists, conventional soldiers, religious fundamentalists and violent football fans.
We have discovered that life-changing and group-defining experiences result in the merging of our personal and collective identities. We call this “identity fusion.” Amalgamated individuals will stop at nothing to advance the interests of their groups, and this applies not only to acts we would hail as heroic – like saving children from a burning building or taking a bullet for one’s comrades – but also to acts of suicide terrorism.
Fusion is commonly measured by showing people a small circle (representing you) and a large circle (representing your group) and placing pairs of these circles in a sequence so that they overlap to varying degrees: not at all, then just a little, then a little more, and so on until the small circle is completely enclosed within the large circle. Participants are then asked which pair of circles best reflects their relationship with the group. People who choose the one in which the small circle is inside the large circle are said to be “fused”. These are people who love their group so much that they will do almost anything to protect it.
This is not unique to humans. Some species of birds feign a broken wing to keep a predator away from their nestlings. One species, the superb Australasian wren, lures predators away from their young by making darting movements and squeaky sounds to mimic the behavior of a delicious mouse. Humans, too, generally go to great lengths to protect their genetic parents, especially their children who (with the exception of identical twins) share more of their genes than other family members. But – unusually in the animal kingdom – humans often go even further, putting themselves in danger to protect groups of genetically unrelated tribe members. In ancient prehistory, these tribes were small enough that everyone knew each other. These local groups bonded over shared trials such as painful initiations, hunting dangerous animals together, and fighting bravely on the battlefield.
Today, however, the merger is spreading to much larger groups, thanks to the ability of the world’s media – including social media – to fill our heads with images of horrific suffering in regional conflicts. distant.
When I met one of the former leaders of the Jemaah Islamiyah terrorist organization in Indonesia, he told me that he was first radicalized in the 1980s after reading newspaper articles about the treatment of his fellow Muslims by Russian soldiers in Afghanistan. Yet, twenty years later, nearly a third of American extremists have been radicalized via social media. by 2016, this proportion had increased to around three-quarters. Smartphones and immersive reporting are shrinking the world to such an extent that forms of suffering shared in face-to-face groups can now be widely recreated and broadcast to millions of people across thousands of miles with a single click.
Fusion based on shared suffering may be powerful, but it alone is not enough to motivate violent extremism. Our research suggests that three other ingredients are also necessary to produce this deadly cocktail: external threat, demonization of the enemy and the belief that peaceful alternatives are lacking. In areas like Gaza, where the suffering of civilians is regularly filmed and shared around the world, it is only natural that meltdown rates among those watching in horror would increase. If people believe that peaceful solutions are impossible, violent extremism will escalate.
