It is based on prediction decades of research My colleagues and I 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 a wide range of groups such as tribal warriors, armed rebels, terrorists, traditional soldiers, religious fundamentalists and violent football fans.
We have found that life-changing and group-defining experiences cause our individual and collective identities to fuse together. We call this “identity fusion.” Connected individuals will stop at nothing to further the interests of their groups, and this applies not only to actions we would appreciate as heroic – such as saving children from burning buildings or standing up for their comrades. Being shot – but also applies to acts of suicide terrorism.
fusion is usually measured By showing people a smaller circle (representing you) and a larger circle (representing your group) and arranging pairs of such circles in an order so that they overlap to varying degrees: Not at all, then just A little bit, 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 represents their relationship with the group. Those who choose the 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 are willing to do anything to protect it.
This is not unique to humans. Some species of birds will feign a broken wing to lure a predator away from their young. One species – the great fairy wren of Australasia – scares predators away from its young by making rapid movements and squealing sounds to mimic the behavior of a rodent. Humans will also generally make every effort to protect their genetic relatives, especially their children, who (except identical twins) share more of their genes than other family members. But – unusually in the animal kingdom – humans often go even further, putting themselves in harm's way to protect groups of genetically unrelated members of the tribe. In ancient prehistory, such tribes were small enough that everyone knew everyone else. These local groups united through shared hardships such as painful beginnings, hunting dangerous animals together, and fighting bravely on the battlefield.
However, nowadays, fusion is increasingly being extended to larger groups, thanks to the ability of the world's media – including social media – to fill our heads with images of terrible suffering in distant regional conflicts. For.
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 fellow Muslims by Russian troops in Afghanistan. They went. However, twenty years later, nearly a third of American extremists had been radicalized through social media feeds, and By 2016, this proportion increased to almost three-quartersSmartphones and immersive reporting have shrunk the world to such an extent that forms of suffering shared in face-to-face groups can now be recreated on a large scale and spread across thousands of miles to millions of people at the click of a button. Is.
Fusion based on shared suffering can be powerful, but is not sufficient in itself to inspire violent extremism. our research Suggests that three other ingredients are also necessary to produce a lethal cocktail: outgroup threat, demonization of the enemy, and the belief that peaceful alternatives are lacking. In areas like Gaza, where the suffering of civilians is routinely captured on video and shared around the world, it is natural that the rate of fusion would increase among those who watch in horror. If people believe that peaceful solutions are impossible, violent extremism will increase.