If you were a man amongst the Mandan people of North America and wanted to stay part of the tribe, you really had to earn it. The rite of passage through which they went was known as the Okipa ceremony and it was extraordinarily brutal. The 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 passed out from the pain at which point their left little finger was amputated and they would set off on a race around the village to prove their strength.
This is clearly an extreme example, but initiation rites of one sort or another are pretty universal amongst humans. Sometimes they are so common we don’t even really notice them, like male circumcision, baptism, First Communion, bah mitzvahs, graduation ceremonies, even stag dos. Sometimes they are truly bizarre. You may recall a few years ago the scandal when videos surfaced of young Royal Marines being initiated by being made to fight naked whilst covered in cooking oil and drinking out of paddling pools filled with vomit and urine. Even our educational elite take part in this kind of weird stuff, for example one initiation ritual for a student drinking society at Cambridge University was once rumoured to involve downing a pint of water with a live goldfish in it. You see the same kind of thing at sports clubs and universities up and down the country.
What most have in common are elements of suffering and submission. Why do humans do this to themselves?
The ultimate aim is to generate a feeling of belonging and loyalty to a group. Humans are psychologically pre-disposed to feel loyalty towards a perceived ‘in-group’ (more on this in Love, Loyalty and The Trolley Dilemma from 6th March, 2019). At its most advanced stage, this feeling of loyalty takes the form of ‘identity fusion’ where a person identifies themselves as a member of the group first, and as an individual second and therefore is unquestioningly loyal to the group.
Historically, our in-group has been our family, village or tribe, and devotion to such a group brings obvious survival benefits to all the members of the group. But with a more fragmented society, our in-group now comes in many forms. Where before, the in-group needed loyalty and co-operation between its members to ensure that it survived in the wilderness, now we might want to create loyalty to ensure people give their best on the sports pitch, perform well as a team in a workplace, or devotedly serve their community.
We feel loyalty to one another when we have been through experiences that we feel to be personally shaping in some way, events that pack a big psychological and emotional punch. Evidence shows that the effect is actually stronger if the event is negative, rather than positive. One study, for example, showed that fighters in the civil war in Libya ended up feeling more closely bound to their fellow fighters than to their own families. So, when we want to form a group, we put the new members through a negative experience that results in them feeling psychologically bound to the group. The same principle underlies the many team building exercises of the corporate world, almost all of which involve people doing things they don’t really want to do at the start of the day.
So initiation rituals are a quirky vestige of our evolutionary past but their persistence and ubiquity shows how strongly we feel the need to be part of a group.