Abstract
Willingness to lay down one’s life for a group of non-kin, well documented historically and ethnographically, represents an evolutionary puzzle. Building on research in social psychology, we develop a mathematical model showing how conditioning cooperation on previous shared experience can allow individually costly pro-group behavior to evolve. The model generates a series of predictions that we then test empirically in a range of special sample populations (including military veterans, college fraternity/sorority members, football fans, martial arts practitioners, and twins). Our empirical results show that sharing painful experiences produces “identity fusion” – a visceral sense of oneness – which in turn can motivate self-sacrifice, including willingness to fight and die for the group. Practically, our account of how shared dysphoric experiences produce identity fusion helps us better understand such pressing social issues as suicide terrorism, holy wars, sectarian violence, gang-related violence, and other forms of intergroup conflict.
Highlights
Is a cause of extreme cooperation across cultures, in contrast with the less extreme forms of cooperation motivated by identification and ethnic psychology[22,24]
One explanation for the extreme cooperation caused by identity fusion is that groupmates are perceived as “psychological kin”[15,24], i.e. that the the human brain, while “wired” for sacrificial behavior towards close kin, makes “mistakes” by facilitating pro-group behavior irrespective of genetic relatedness
The impetus for self-sacrifice by group members is often couched in the language of kinship; and empirical studies show that the effects of identity fusion on pro-national outcomes is partially mediated by feelings of family-like ties toward fellow countrymen[21,22,25,26]
Summary
Is a cause of extreme cooperation across cultures, in contrast with the less extreme forms of cooperation motivated by identification (alignment with a group category) and ethnic psychology (the acquisition, storage, and deployment of socially learned group identity markers)[22,24]. Dysphoric experiences may become entrenched as self-defining memories that define fellow group members (Fig. 1) This mechanism of group solidarity is inherently more extreme, and powerful, than oft-cited forms of group commitment such as identification[31], which have been reliably associated with collective euphoria and group performance[32]. Research indicates that when the group is threatened, fused persons override self-preservation concerns to protect the group at any cost[15] This proximate explanation for self-sacrifice motivates us to explore the evolutionary implications of conditioning cooperation on shared past experience. First we investigate theoretically whether conditioning cooperation on types of shared experience can evolve by natural selection On these grounds we test the predictions of our models empirically, via correlational, quasi-experimental, and experimental studies. Our findings support the hypothesis that shared dysphoric experiences produce identity fusion and this in turn predicts willingness to fight and die for the group
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