This prediction is based on several decades of research that my colleagues and I at the University of Oxford undertook to find out what drives people to fight and die for their groups. We use a variety of methods, including interviews, surveys and psychological experiments, to collect data from a variety 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.” United individuals will stop at nothing to advance the interests of their groups, not just for acts we would consider heroic—like rescuing children from burning buildings or taking a bullet for our comrades—but also for Suicide bombings.
Fusion is usually measured by showing people a small circle (representing you) and a large circle (representing your group), and placing pairs of such circles in an order so that they overlap each other to varying degrees: not at all, then just a little, then a little more and so on until the small circle is completely enclosed by the large circle. Participants are then asked which pair of circles best reflects their relationship with the group. People who vote for the one where the small circle is inside the big circle are said to be “merged”. These are people who love their group so much that they will do almost anything to protect it.
This is not just the case with humans. Some bird species fake a broken wing to keep a predator away from their young. One species – the magnificent wren of Australasia – lures predators away from their young by making darting movements and squeaking noises to mimic the behavior of a delicious mouse. People also typically go to great lengths to protect their genetic relatives, especially their children, who (with the exception of identical twins) share more genes than other family members. But – unusual in the animal kingdom – humans often go further, putting themselves in harm’s way to protect groups of genetically unrelated tribe members. In ancient prehistory, such tribes were so small that everyone knew everyone. These local groups bonded together through common trials such as painful initiations, hunting dangerous animals together and fighting bravely on the battlefield.
However, today, thanks to the ability of the global media – including social media – to fill our minds with images of terrible suffering in far-flung regional conflicts, the fusion is being expanded to include much larger groups.
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 Russian soldiers’ treatment of fellow Muslims in Afghanistan. However, twenty years later, nearly a third of American extremists have been radicalized through social media feeds by 2016, this share had risen to around 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 widely replicated and transmitted to millions of people across thousands of miles at the touch of a button.
Fusion based on shared suffering may be powerful, but alone it is not enough to motivate violent extremism. Our research suggests that three other ingredients are also necessary to produce the deadly cocktail: outgroup threat, demonization of the enemy, and a belief in the lack of peaceful alternatives. In regions like Gaza, where the suffering of civilians is regularly captured on video and broadcast around the world, it is only natural that the fusion among horrified onlookers increases. If people believe that peaceful solutions are impossible, violent extremism will skyrocket.
