It is based on prediction Decades of research That I and my colleagues at the University of Oxford are working 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 tribal warriors, armed insurgents, terrorists, traditional soldiers, religious extremists, and violent football fans.
We have found that life-changing and group-defining experiences cause our personal and collective identities to become intertwined. We call this “identity fusion”. Fused individuals will stop at nothing to advance their group’s interests, and this applies not only to actions we would praise as heroic—like saving children from burning buildings or standing up for their peers. Shooting – but also acts of suicidal terrorism.
Fusion is usually measured By drawing people into 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 to varying degrees: not at all, Then a little, then a little more, and so on until the smaller circle is completely enclosed in the larger circle. People are then asked which pair of circles best captures their relationship with the group. Those who choose one in which the smaller circle is inside the larger circle are called “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 bird species will feign a broken wing to lure a predator away from their young. One species—Australia’s magnificent fairy wren—draws predators away from its young by making fearful movements and screeching sounds to mimic the behavior of an adorable mouse. Humans also typically go to great lengths to protect their genetic relatives, especially their offspring who (except 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 clan members. In ancient prehistory, such tribes were so small that everyone knew everyone else. These local groups are bound by shared trials such as painful initiations, hunting dangerous animals together, and fighting bravely on the battlefield.
Today, however, the fusion has been scaled to much larger groups, thanks to the capacity of the world’s media—including social media—to fill our heads with images of terrible 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 had first become 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 were radicalized through social media feeds, and By 2016 this ratio had increased to almost three quarters. Smartphones and immersive reporting shrink the world to such an extent that at the click of a button forms of shared suffering in face-to-face groups can now be reproduced on a large scale and spread over thousands of miles to millions of people.
Fusion based on shared suffering can be powerful, but is not enough by itself to inspire violent extremism. Our research suggests that three other elements are also necessary to produce a deadly cocktail: collective threat, demonization of the enemy, and the belief that peaceful alternatives are lacking. In areas like Gaza, where the suffering of civilians is regularly captured on video and shared around the world, it is only natural that rates of fusion among those watching in horror will increase. If people believe that peaceful solutions are impossible, violent extremism will increase.
