If you had three wishes to change the world, what would they be?

Perhaps you
would like to put an end to war? Reverse global warming? Or eliminate extreme
poverty?
The key to solving all these problems is glue. It doesn’t come in a tube. It’s a very
special adhesive – the kind that holds societies together. Social scientists call it
‘social cohesion’ or ‘solidarity’. Whatever we choose to call it, social glue is what
makes people cooperate and solve problems for the greater good.
Understanding how groups become glued together is crucial to addressing some of
the biggest issues facing humanity today.
If I had three wishes for the world, they would be:
1. To predict, prevent, and resolve civil wars. We know that about half of all
insurgencies peter out within a year of their formation. Those that survive seem to
have found the knack for producing the social glue we are interested in. Attacking
such groups with bullets and bombs actually seems to bind them even more tightly
together. If you want to disband groups like this it would be more effective to
sabotage the mechanisms that fuse them to a common cause. The more we
understand these mechanisms the more we can do to curtail sectarian violence,
genocide, and many other forms of civil conflict.
2. To channel social cohesion for the collective good. Civil strife can produce social
glue. We had a researcher on the ground in Libya throughout the recent revolution
observing how the collective will of ordinary citizens brought a modern army to its
knees (albeit with some help from NATO). We now know more about the
mechanisms that made this possible. If only that energy could have been
harnessed more productively in the aftermath of Gaddafi’s downfall, then Libya
might be a very different place today.
3. To mobilize a global response to economic inequality and environmental threat.
Many social movements in the twentieth century experimented with rituals aimed
at binding us together as a species to solve world problems. Those experiments
have largely failed – visions of a communist utopia or a brotherhood of man have
been shattered by old divisions or faded in time. But that doesn’t mean they
couldn’t work. We are currently studying movements of this kind on the Pacific
island archipelago of Vanuatu. Imagine if we could find a new and more effective
way of gluing together our species as a whole, championing a set of shared values
and goals underwritten by a universal morality rather than a doctrinal orthodoxy of
any kind. That would be the first crucial step in solving some of the world’s biggest
collective action problems – global warming and extreme poverty being only two
examples.
Pie in the sky? Some of us don’t think so. I direct a project that tries to explain how
social glue is produced and how it can be used (Whitehouse 2012; Jones 2013). It is
the single largest project ever funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research
Council and it is also the most international one ever, involving the coordinated
efforts of scientists not only in North America and Europe, but also around the
world, including many countries that are not often associated with scientific
breakthroughs. It has to be that way, because the glue we are interested in is often
stronger in traditional or rural cultures and weaker in the big urban centres where
scientists typically work.
Two Kinds of Social Glue
There are two main kinds of social glue: ‘social identification’ and ‘identity fusion’.
The latter is most simply described as a visceral sense of oneness with others in
one’s group. This may be manifested in a variety of ways. For instance, when
another group member is threatened it prompts the same defensive reactions as a
personal attack. For the fused individual, the boundary between the personal and
social self is porous – activation of one’s sense of personal self also serves to
activate feelings about the social self. Fused individuals regard other members of
their group as irreplaceable, and seek to reform and reintegrate them when they
violate their group’s norms rather than kicking them out for good. When the group
is under attack, or their status threatened, fusion increases commitment to
maintain the group.
Identity fusion is a widespread feature of kin groups and other small social units
whose members share the trials and tribulations of life together. This sharing of
experiences as well as the memories of those experiences, particularly of enduring
and overcoming hardships, seems to be an important part of the mechanism
generating fusion, most commonly within families but sometimes also within much
larger groups.
My mother remembers how tightly glued together our family was throughout the
war. During the Blitz they spent a lot of time huddled together in bomb
shelters. One night, however, my mother’s uncle and aunt and their young son
emerged before the All Clear had been sounded, and went inside.  The last bomb of
the air raid fell on their house and they were killed instantly.
An evacuee at the time, my mother only heard about the tragedy months later. She
was on the top deck of a bus. She remembers it being a glorious day, the pretty
summer dress she was wearing, that it was a treat to get the seat at the front. Her
mother turned to her and said: “Your uncle and auntie’s house was bombed and
they were inside it. Your cousin too.” That was all. It would have been improper to
display emotion in public, so where better to deliver the news than on a crowded
London bus? My mother was nine years old at the time.
It is very unlikely my mother would have remembered the weather or what she was
wearing or even where she was sitting that day on the bus, were it not for the
emotional impact of my grandmother’s words. Integral to our sense of self is a set
of memories of past experiences, including episodes that are felt to be especially
salient in forming who we are. Such episodes will often relate to painful or
disturbing experiences because these are generally better remembered than
pleasant or gratifying ones.
While these ‘bad’ experiences come to form part of our personal autobiographies
that does not necessarily mean they are rehearsed as narratives. Often, there are
social disincentives to talk about such experiences — because they conflict with
idealized conceptions of family life, gender roles, Britishness, or whatever. But that
doesn’t mean the memories are lost. They remain as part of our private sense of
self. Indeed this sense of privacy, of experience that is internally generated rather
than externally imposed, adds to the authenticity of these aspects of our self-
conception.
The impression that highly salient personal experiences are shared by others fuels
the fusion of self and other. It is as if those who have been through the same thing
are more ‘like us’ and the boundary between self and other becomes more porous.
This would help to explain why people who endure terrible ordeals, such as natural
disasters or wars, or who have experienced persecution or oppression, often feel a
special bond with their fellow sufferers. My mother, for example, felt a special
connection with children who turned up at school with black armbands. And
conversely, it can feel as if people who haven’t actually experienced your pain
themselves cannot truly understand it, and may seem inauthentic if they talk about
the subject with an air of authority.
In all these respects, identity fusion differs from what psychologists call ‘social
identification’ (Swann et al. 2012). Social identity theorists have repeatedly shown
that personal and group identities are non-overlapping. Social identity and group
identity have a sort of hydraulic relationship to each other: the more one is
activated, the less the other is. If your group identity prevails in your social life, the
less prominently social identity willfeature. Attacks on the group activate social but
not personal selves in people who identify with, but are not fused with, the group.
Pro-group action is not motivated by the personal self. Members of the group are
replaceable and norm violators can be more readily excluded from the group.
When the status of the group is threatened, identification with the group is
weakened.
Shared Dysphoria, Fusion, and Extreme Rituals
In 2011, project researcher Brian McQuinn went to Misrata, Libya, to study people’s
experiences of the siege of their city by Gaddafi’s troops. Amid the victory
celebrations, I joined him there. In collaboration with Bill Swann, a social
psychologist based at the University of Texas at Austin, we designed and
implemented a survey revealing that the more dysphoric (aversive or distressing)
the shared experience of the fighting, the stronger the resulting identity fusion. To
understand the mechanisms in more detail we are currently carrying out surveys
with veterans of the Vietnam War, members of university fraternities and sororities
who have undergone painful or humiliating hazing rituals, mothers who had
particularly traumatic birthing experiences, survivors of disasters, and other groups
that are formed around shared experiences of suffering.
Dysphoric rituals (such as painful initiations, ascetic ordeals, or severe forms of
penance) are a bit like coming under fire in a warzone, but perhaps more
powerfully bonding. By definition they are ‘causally opaque‘ meaning that they can
be interpreted in a seemingly infinite variety of ways: it’s not clear how the actions
one performs lead, through a causal chain of events, to any outcomes, so there’s a
lot of room for speculation and rumination. Unlike a car crash or even a traumatic
experience on the battlefield, which provokes a rather limited array of reflections
(who was to blame, why me, etc), the range of interpretations that one can place on
a dysphoric ritual experience is more open-ended. Indeed, the sense of its
significance can actually increase over time, rather than decay. In communal rituals
we observe others undergoing the same experience, and can imagine them sharing
the same rich interpretive process afterwards. The forces shaping one’s own
uniquely personal experiences are felt to be shared by a special cohort of others,
causing group members who have undergone these rituals to ‘fuse’.
That’s one of our hypotheses, at least. In a series of experiments using artificial
rituals and varying levels of arousal (intensity of feeling) we have shown that, after a
time delay, the volume and specificity of interpretive reflection on the rituals is
greater among participants in a high-arousal condition than for controls (Richert et
al. 2005). Similar effects have been found using field studies, by systematically
comparing the interpretive richness of people’s accounts of rituals involving
variable levels of arousal. The impression of sharing subtle or hidden meanings of
the ritual experience is thought to contribute to high levels of identity fusion among
participants. We call this the ‘imagistic mode’ of group cohesion (Whitehouse 2004).
Shared Identity in the Big Religions
Although the sharing of especially salient and memorable experiences seems to
play an important role in identity fusion, this does not seem to be such an
important feature of social identification and the categorical ties on which this is
based. Social identification is more like a badge or a uniform that we can put on
and take off at will. Whereas the building blocks of the personal self are internally
generated states (e.g. emotions, memories, and reflections), social identities are
acquired from the world around us. The sense of likeness this produces can be
compelling but it doesn’t penetrate our sense of self to the same extent or in the
same way.
When people participate in the same rituals on a daily or weekly basis, it is
impossible for them to recall the details of every occasion. Instead they represent
the rituals and their meanings as types  of behavior—a Holy Communion or a call to
prayer, for instance. Psychologists describe these representations as ‘procedural
scripts’ and ‘semantic schemas’. Scripts and schemas specify what typically happens
in a given ritual and what is generally thought to be its significance. In a group
whose identity markers are composed mainly of scripts and schemas, what it
means to be a member of the tradition is generalized beyond people of our
acquaintance, applying to everyone who performs similar acts and holds similar
beliefs. This route to the construction of communal identity, based on routinization
of rituals and other behaviours, appears to be a necessary condition for the
emergence of imagined communities  — large populations sharing a common
tradition and capable of behaving as a coalition in interactions with non-members,
despite the fact that no individual in the community could possibly know all the
others, or even hope to meet all of them in the course of a lifetime.
Routinization may have other important effects as well. For instance, it allows very
complex networks of doctrines and narratives to be learned and stored in collective
memory, making it relatively easy to spot unauthorized innovations. Moreover,
routinization seems to suppress reflection, in effect producing more slavish
conformity to group norms. Part of the reason may be that, having achieved
procedural fluency, one no longer needs to reflect on how  to perform the ritual,
and this in turn makes one less likely to reflect on why  one should perform it. Thus
routinization would seem to aid the transmission of doctrinal orthodoxies, which
are traditions of belief and practice that are relatively immune to innovation  and in
which unintended deviation from the norm is readily detectable. We call this the
‘doctrinal mode’ of group cohesion (Whitehouse 2004).
Local and Extended Fusion
So far, both in our experiments and in our studies of dysphoric rituals in the real
world, we have focused our attention mainly on rituals in small face-to-face groups.
This ‘local fusion’ may have its evolutionary roots in psychological kinship, where
shared experience acted as a proxy for genetic relatedness. Our central hypothesis
is that the belief that someone else shares and so truly understands your suffering
blurs the boundary between yourself and that other person. But while this can be
true among people who witness each other’s trials and tribulations it can also be
extended by less direct routes, for example by means of especially compelling
narratives. To the extent that Jesus of Nazareth’s sufferings on the cross can be
convincingly equated with our own sufferings it may even be possible to fuse with a
person who lived thousands of years ago.
Fusion can also be extended to larger groups and ideologies — and not always in
ways we would want. Consider the highly ritualized and emotional gatherings
organized at Nuremberg by Hitler and his cronies. During these dark days ordinary
Germans were swept up in a tide of nationalistic fervor rooted in shared ritual
experiences. Nevertheless, Hitler’s rallies were too big for all those attending to
have known each other personally. There was also a strong doctrinal aspect that is
normally lacking in dysphoric rituals: Hitler was preaching an ideology that,
however repugnant to us now, was hypnotically seductive to his audiences.
Apparently, people were fusing with a belief system as well as with each other.
Extended fusion of this kind is likely to be different from local fusion. In the case of
Nazis at the Nuremberg rallies, they couldn’t encode all the other people attending
and so couldn’t recognize all of them subsequently. Somebody might claim to have
been present and there might be evidence to support it but I don’t think this could
ever be as psychologically convincing as actually remembering them being there.
Moreover, at least some of the ideas associated with this kind of experience have
an external origin and so are less intimately connected with the personal self. Recall
that one of the hypothesized features of local fusion is that personal experience, on
which my sense of self is at least partly constructed, provides the main reference
point for sharing a common bond. So extended fusion would seem to be a more
tentative kind of fusion of self and other. Since it depends on external sources as
well as direct personal engagement (e.g. testimony rather than experience) it
carries less conviction.
You might think that extended fusion is somehow a midway point between local
fusion with known individuals and identification with large anonymous
communities. But this doesn’t seem to be the case – fusion with country, for
example, has all the same hallmark features as fusion with family, making both
kinds of fusion distinct from identification (Swann et el. 2012).
The Social Functions of Ritual, Fusion, and Identification
Identity fusion could be seen as a form of insurance through investment in social
networks based on relational ties. When the fate of the group is threatened or
uncertain, fused individuals experience increased commitment. And when a
transgressor is identified in the group they might be punished harshly but they are
nevertheless welcomed back into the fold. This kind of investment in the group is
not provided by identification with groups based on categorical ties. Although there
may be some exceptions, when people merely identify with a group and its
status declines, so does commitment to the group. And since the members of such
groups are eminently replaceable, transgressors can be eliminated (e.g. by
exclusion or execution). This means that the members of fused groups can rely on
the group for support even when times are hard or when one’s reputation has
been damaged.
Identity fusion fosters courage and self-sacrifice in the face of external threats in a
way that social identification cannot. When the group is at risk of predation,
members not only band together but individually experience a sense of enhanced
strength, invulnerability, and increased willingness to endorse acts of outgroup
hostility. This means that members of fused groups will be more formidable
adversaries in inter-group conflict, all else being equal.
Prior to the emergence of the doctrinal mode in human prehistory, group identity
was forged largely on the basis of directly shared experiences, including
participation in rituals. Thus, the imagistic mode has long been a means of
generating the impression of shared mental content based on common experience.
With the appearance of more routinized rituals, however, a new kind of group
identity became possible based on semantic schemas and procedural scripts that
could be generalized to any member of the in-group, even to complete strangers.
Simply wearing a certain mode of dress or hairstyle now revealed a lot about a
person’s beliefs and practices. We could then make inferences on this basis about
their trustworthiness, even people we had never met before.
Routinized rituals provide a foundation for social identification with large
communities, capable of encompassing indefinitely many individuals singing from
the same hymn sheet (literally as well as metaphorically). Expanding the size of the
in- group in this way has implications for the scale on which people can engage in
cooperative behavior, establishing a basis for cooperation with strangers simply
because they carry the insignia that display shared beliefs and practices. At the
same time, however, ties based on identification fulfill different social functions
from ties based on fusion.
While individuals are only capable of fusing with a small number of groups (typically
two or three at most), it is possible to identify with a great many different groups.
This means we can build a complex division of labour in which we shift flexibly
between roles as changing social situations dictate. There is no limit on the size of
groups with whom identification is possible.
The emergence and spread of the doctrinal mode was facilitated by the appearance
of the first ever regular collective rituals, focused around daily production and
consumption, and the spread of identity markers across larger populations, for
instance in the form of stamp seals used for body decoration and more
standardized pottery designs in the Neolithic Middle East (Whitehouse and Hodder
2010). The appearance and spread of routinized rituals seems to have been linked
to the need for greater trust and cooperation when interacting with relative
strangers. Consider the difficulties of persuading people you scarcely know that
they should make long-term investments in your services based on a promise, or
should pay taxes or tribute in return for protection or sustenance in times of need.
In the absence of more detailed information about the trustworthiness of
prospective trading partners or remote governors who promise protection by their
militia, shared insignia proclaiming commitment to common beliefs and practices
becomes a persuasive form of evidence. In such conditions, groups with routinized
rituals capable of uniting large populations will tend to out-compete those who lack
shared identity markers of this kind.
Using Social Glue to Change the World
My three wishes for the world may be granted as a consequence of understanding
better the way social glue works.
The first of my wishes, recall, is to repair societies torn apart by civil war. People
fight and die for the group because they are glued to each other in a particularly
powerful way. True, people can be forced to fight on pain of torture or execution
but coercion alone is a weak and unstable way of running an army. In a smoke-
filled room in Misrata surrounded by eager young men with assault rifles, the head
of the revolutionary forces looked intently at me from under his camouflaged cap:
“I trained many soldiers for Gaddafi before I trained the men in this room,” he said.
“And I tell you that one civilian who believes in the cause and will die for his
comrades is more deadly than ten soldiers who kill for a wage.”
One of the most powerful binding agents in the military may turn out to be shared
dysphoria – the experience of enduring hardships together, whether in hazing
rituals, grueling forms of training, or the experience of coming under fire. For
thousands of years tribal groups seem to have exploited this mechanism by using
terrifying and painful initiations to fuse together their fighting units and raiding
parties. In civil conflicts the outgroup is not always the tribe next door – sometimes
it is an organ of the state, such as the British army on Bloody Sunday or the
Egyptian police at the beginning of the Arab Spring. But whoever the enemy
happens to be, what drives us to fight them is not that they are in the wrong. We
may point to this as a rationale but that’s not what really drives us. If we fought
against dictators and thugs simply because they were in the wrong we’d all be at
war, all the time. Rather, when we fight back against injustice it’s because we
believe that its victims share our suffering. The victims are, in an important sense,
one with us. So when we respond with violence it is little more than self-defense.
Shared dysphoria and the fusion of identities it produces are like an unexploded
bomb – it takes only one careless move, such as an unprovoked attack by an
outgroup, to unleash its lethal force. And so we should treat the presence of this
kind of fusion in a population with the same respect that we treat a minefield. Just
as mines can be detected and safely exploded, it should be possible also to monitor
the fusion levels of communities, identifying those that could blow at any time, and
harnessing their capacities for collective action in peaceful and consensual ways.
That is more or less what happened in Derry, the site of Bloody Sunday —
eventually. But did there need to be years of sectarian violence and appalling loss
of life to make a peace process work? If this period of civil war could have been
predicted surely it would have been better to begin tackling tribalism and building a
more consensual system of governance before rather than after so many lives were
lost?
Learning how to build social cohesion for the betterment of humanity is the key not
only to granting my three wishes but to solving all collective action problems facing
our species. Understanding how social glue works is the first step. At the moment
we have many hypotheses but few hard facts. However, we are now engaged in a
massive programme of research to test our hunches against the evidence – from
the lab, from history, from buried civilizations, from the internet, from ordinary
people going about their lives, and from soldiers on the battlefield. Our project
hopes to unlock the secrets of social bonding and cooperation in humans. If only
we could understand better how social glue works and what it does, we could
harness the passions of the collective and rebuild the social organization of our
species in more globally consensual ways.
True, we could continue trying to change the world by hunting down terrorists,
bombing dictators, imposing economic sanctions on fundamentalist states, and
playing hardball around negotiating tables. But I believe we can change the world
more, and more lastingly, by first understanding ourselves better.