This prediction is based on several decades of research that my colleagues and I have been carrying out at Oxford University 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 discovered that life-changing, group-defining experiences cause our personal and collective identities to merge. We call it “identity fusion.” Fused individuals will stop at nothing to promote the interests of their groups, and this applies not only to acts that we would applaud as heroic (such as rescuing children from burning buildings or being shot by our comrades) but also to acts of suicide terrorism.
Fusion is commonly measured showing people a small circle (representing you) and a large circle (representing your group) and placing pairs of such circles in a sequence so that they overlap to varying degrees: not at all, then just a little, then some more. , and so on until the small circle is completely enclosed in the large circle. People are then asked which pair of circles best captures their relationship with the group. People who choose the one where the small circle is inside the big circle are said to be “fused.” They are people who love their group so much that they would do almost anything to protect it.
This is not exclusive to humans. Some species of birds pretend to have a broken wing to keep a predator away from their fledglings. One species, the superb Australasian wren, lures predators away from its young by making rapid movements and squeaking sounds to mimic the behavior of a delightful mouse. Humans also often 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, unusually in the animal kingdom, humans often go further by putting themselves in harm’s way to protect groups of genetically unrelated tribesmen. In ancient prehistory, these tribes were small enough that everyone knew each other. These local groups bonded through shared trials, such as painful initiations, hunting dangerous animals together, and fighting bravely on the battlefield.
Today, however, the fusion has expanded to much larger groups, thanks to the ability of the world’s media (including social media) to fill our heads with images of horrendous suffering in distant 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 Russian soldiers’ treatment of fellow Muslims in Afghanistan. . However, twenty years later, almost a third of American extremists were radicalized through social media, and By 2016, that proportion had increased to about three-quarters. Smartphones and immersive reporting shrink the world to such an extent that forms of suffering shared in face-to-face groups can now be largely recreated and broadcast to millions of people across thousands of miles with the click of a button.
Fusion based on shared suffering can be powerful, but it is not enough on its own to motivate violent extremism. Our research suggests that three other ingredients are also necessary to produce the deadly cocktail: the threat of the outgroup, the demonization of the enemy, and the belief that peaceful alternatives are lacking. In regions like Gaza, where the sufferings of civilians are regularly captured on video and shared around the world, it is natural for rates of fusion to increase among those watching in horror. If people believe that peaceful solutions are impossible, violent extremism will skyrocket.