This prediction is based on several decades of research that my colleagues and I at the University of Oxford have conducted to find out why people are 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 find that life-changing, group-defining experiences cause our personal and collective identities to fuse together. We call this “identity fusion”. Bonded individuals will stop at nothing to advance the interests of their groups, and this applies not only to acts we would praise as heroic—such as rescuing children from burning buildings or taking a bullet for one’s comrades—but also to acts of suicidal terrorism.
Fusion is commonly measured by showing people a small circle (representing you) and a large circle (representing your group), and placing pairs of such circles back-to-back with varying degrees of overlap: not at all, then just a little, then a little more and so on until the small circle is completely closed into the big circle. People are then asked which pair of circles best describes their relationship to the group. People who choose the one with the small circle inside the big circle are said to be “fused”. They 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 broken wings to draw a predator away from their young. One species – the magnificent fairy wren of Australasia – lures predators away from their young by making jerky movements and squeaking sounds to mimic the behavior of an adorable mouse. People also usually go to great lengths to protect their genetic relatives, 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 further by putting themselves in danger to protect groups of genetically unrelated members of the tribe. In ancient prehistory, such tribes were small enough that everyone knew everyone. These local groups bonded through common trials such as painful initiations, hunting dangerous animals together, and fighting bravely on the battlefield.
Today, however, the fusion is extended 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 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 Muslims in Afghanistan by Russian soldiers. Twenty years later, however, nearly a third of American extremists were radicalized through social media, and by 2016, that proportion had risen to around three-quarters. Smartphones and immersive news are shrinking the world to such an extent that forms of shared suffering in face-to-face groups can now be largely recreated and spread among millions of people across thousands of miles at the click of a button.
Fusion based on shared suffering can be powerful, but alone is not enough to motivate violent extremism. Our research suggests that three other ingredients are also necessary to make a lethal cocktail: external threat, demonization of the enemy, and the belief that peaceful alternatives are lacking. In regions like Gaza, where the suffering of civilians is regularly captured on video and shared around the world, it is only natural that the level of fusion among those watching in horror will increase. If people believe that peaceful solutions are impossible, violent extremism will spiral.
