HARVEY WHITEHOUSE
This prediction is based on several decades of research that my colleagues and I have been 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 become fused together. We call it “identity fusion.” Fused individuals will stop at nothing to advance the interests of their groups, and this applies not only to acts we would applaud as heroic—such as rescuing children from burning buildings or taking a bullet for one’s comrades—but also acts of suicide terrorism.
Fusion is commonly measured by showing people a small circle (representing you) and a big 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 bit, then a bit more, and so on until the little circle is completely enclosed in the big circle. Then people are asked which pair of circles best captures their relationship with the group. People who choose the one in which the little circle is inside the big circle are said to be “fused.” Those are people who love their group so much that they will do almost anything to protect it.
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