This prediction is based on several decades of research that my colleagues and I are undertaking at the University of Oxford to establish what makes people willing to fight and die for their groups. 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 found that life-changing and group-defining experiences cause our personal and collective identities to merge. We call it “identity fusion.” Cohesive individuals will stop at nothing to advance the interests of their groups, and this applies not only to acts that we would applaud as heroic — like saving children from burning buildings or taking a bullet for their comrades — but also to acts of suicidal terrorism.
Fusion is often measured showing people a small circle (representing you) and a large circle (representing your group) and placing pairs of such circles in 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 in the large circle. Then people are asked which pair of circles best captures 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 will feign a broken wing to draw a predator away from their young. One species—the great fairy of Australasia—lures predators away from its young by making darting movements and squeaking sounds to mimic the behavior of a tasty mouse. Also, people will usually try to protect their genetic relatives, especially their children, who (except for identical twins) share more of their genes than other family members. But—unusually in the animal kingdom—humans often go further, putting themselves in harm’s way to protect groups of genetically unrelated members of the tribe. In ancient prehistory, such tribes were small enough that everyone knew everyone else. These local groups bonded through common sufferings such as painful initiations, by hunting dangerous animals together, and by fighting bravely on the battlefield.
Nowadays, however, fusion is being expanded 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 far-flung regional conflicts.
When I met with one of the former leaders of the terrorist organization Jemaah Islamiyah in Indonesia, he told me that he first became radicalized in the 1980s after reading newspaper reports about the treatment of fellow Muslims by Russian soldiers in Afghanistan. Twenty years later, however, nearly a third of American extremists have been radicalized through social media, and by 2016 that proportion had increased to about three-quarters. Smartphones and immersive reporting are shrinking the world to such an extent that forms of shared suffering in face-to-face groups can now be largely recreated and disseminated to millions of people across thousands of miles at the click of a button.
Fusion based on shared suffering can be powerful, but it is not enough by itself to fuel violent extremism. Our research suggests that three other ingredients are also necessary to produce the lethal cocktail: outgroup threat, demonization of the enemy, and the belief that peaceful alternatives are lacking. In regions like Gaza, where the suffering of civilians is regularly filmed and disseminated around the world, it is only natural that rates of fusion between those who observe horror will increase. If people believe that peaceful solutions are impossible, violent extremism will spiral.
