As humans we are pre-disposed to bonding in groups. We all know the joy in belonging, whether that’s to a family group, a sports team, or some kind of club or society. We rapidly develop a sense of loyalty to groups to which we feel we belong, this is known as ‘in-group loyalty’. At its most intense in-group loyalty takes the form of ‘identity fusion’ which is when a person feels a visceral sense of belonging to a group, a sensation so strong that the person primarily identifies themselves as a member of the group rather than an individual (1).
When this occurs the bonds that people feel towards one another can be as strong, or even stronger, than family bonds, bonds so tight that members are willing to die for one another (2). One study demonstrating this was conducted among civilians fighting on the front line in the Libyan revolution of 2011 leading to the overthrow Colonel Gaddafi. These groups of fighters reported that they felt closer and more loyal towards their brothers in arms than they did to their own family (3).
More prosaically, identity fusion has been shown to exist amongst football fans in the UK who spend large amounts of money on club merchandise and on travelling to watch their team and, frequently, display the depth of their loyalty by inking themselves with club tattoos (1). It is the intense feelings of euphoria when the team wins, and dysphoria when they lose, that bond these fans together because the events that cause these highs and lows of emotion feel personally important to them.
In fact it has been shown that shared negative experiences may be even more powerful in generating group loyalty than positive experiences (4). This has long been understood by many corporate team builders who make teams engage in all kinds of unpleasant, embarrassing, and challenging activities in order to bond them more closely.
It is very common for societies and clubs, particularly student societies or sports clubs to have initiation ceremonies for new members that involve unpleasant tasks or experiences with the tacit knowledge that those experiencing these unpleasant things will be bonded by their shared experience. Whilst downing five pints and running naked around the touch line in order to join a rugby team may be a faint echo of this evolutionarily driven behaviour, perhaps more evocative examples can be found in the initiation ceremonies that take place amongst many traditional societies. These frequently involve physical disfigurement such as scarification, periods of deprivation and physical torment, and sometimes the use of hallucinogens or alcohol.
These ceremonies are often used to initiate children into the community at the time they reach adulthood, such as the boys of the Brazilian Satere-Mawe tribe who have to wear gloves filled with fierce bullet ants in order to become warriors (5). Or how about the Okipa ceremony of the Mandan people of North America during which young men would endure 4 days of fasting and sleeplessness before having wooden skewers inserted through the skin of their chest and backs. They were then hung from the roof of a hut by these skewers until they fainted at which point their left little finger was amputated and they would have to endure a race around the village to prove their strength (6).
These ordeals create a shared, personally shaping experience for the initiates which gives them a extraordinary sense of shared identity with the wider group. Identity fusion is very powerful and fused people are often willing to sacrifice themselves for the sake of the group so achieving this level of loyalty is any team builders dream.
Experimentally, the willingness to sacrifice oneself in this way has been demonstrated using a variation of a classic moral dilemma known as the ‘trolley dilemma’.
In its classic form the trolley dilemma involves an out of control trolley, tram, or train careering along the tracks towards five helpless people who are tied to the tracks. As an onlooker you are within reach of a lever that can divert the trolley along a siding where there is just one helpless person. You have the choice of allowing the five to die or pulling the lever and taking personal responsibility for killing the one.
In the adapted form, that designed to test group loyalty, you can only save the five by throwing yourself onto the tracks. Highly loyal people unhesitatingly sacrifice themselves if they know that the five people at risk are part of their in-group. They are far less likely to do so if the five are from another group (7).
Loyalty to the group need not be demonstrated in such a dramatic way as self-sacrifice. Identity fused people are also far more likely to offer financial or emotional support to others within their group (8).
Why does any of this matter?
We cooperate best with people whom we consider to be part of our group. This is important at a small scale and underlines the importance of taking time to build a sense of identity in environments such as the workplace. It is also important at a bigger scale. Take as an example the national uplift in mood and associated fall in crime rate following the London 2012 Olympics which seemed to bond us as a nation. Or, as a tragic example of the ability of negative experiences to bond us, there was an unexpected period of tolerance and unity following the 7/7 bombings.
Whilst team bonding is par for the course in sports teams and workplaces, I believe we underestimate the importance of bonding ourselves at a community, societal, and national level. We live increasingly isolated lives, separating ourselves in digital silos. At the same time we are allowing the local institutions that used to form the focal points of our communities to close at an alarming rate. For example around 25 village pubs close each week and at some periods in the last ten years village schools have closed at a rate of one a month (9, 10).
This way of living prevents us cohering as an in-group and so we lose all the benefits of goodwill and cooperation that this brings. Arguably, what is more worrying is that the flip side to our propensity to love the in-group, is an equally strong propensity to hate the out-group. And if you’re not in the in-group, then you’re in the out-group. At a time of entrenched social division and escalating levels of violent crime it seems that we are increasingly identifying one another as being in the out-group.
Read more at:
1. Newson et al. Explaining Lifelong Loyalty: The Role of Identity Fusion and Self-Shaping Group Events. PLoS One. 2016; 11(8): e0160427.
2. Swann et al. Identity fusion and self-sacrifice: arousal as a catalyst of pro-group fighting, dying, and helping behavior. J Pers Soc Psychol. 2010 Nov; 99(5):824-41.
3. Whitehouse et al. Brothers in arms: Libyan revolutionaries bond like family. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2014 Dec 16; 111(50): 17783–17785.
4. Whitehouse H, Lanman JA. The Ties That Bind Us. Current Anthropology. 2014;55(6):674–95
5. Attenborough, David (1966). "The Land-Diving Ceremony in Pentecost, New Hebrides)". Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences. The Royal Society. 251 (772): 503.
6. http://plainshumanities.unl.edu/encyclopedia/doc/egp.rel.037
7. Swann, W. B., Jr., Gómez, A., Dovidio, J. F., Hart, S., & Jetten, J. (2010). Dying and killing for one’s group: Identity fusion moderates responses to intergroup versions of the trolley problem. Psychological Science, 21, 1176–1183
8. Swann & Buhrmester. Identify Fusion. Current Directions in Psychological Science 2015, Vol. 24(1) 52-57
9. The Spectator, Sep 10, 2016. The law that’s letting local heroes save their village pubs
10. The Telegraph, Aug 31, 2009. Village Schools Closing at a rate of One a Month