It is pledge season at fraternities and sororities all over
the US. New initiates into these groups
spend a chunk of their first semester engaging in all kinds of activities from
the mundane (wearing an article of clothing to distinguish them from other members
of the group) to the extreme.
Occasionally, stories of hazing rituals make the news when a student is
injured.
Fraternities and Sororities are hardly the only groups in
the world that engage in extreme rituals.
Anthropologists have documented all kind of practices from a variety of
cultures that can be hard to understand for outside observers.
Clearly, these rituals have to serve some function. The speculation is that the most extreme
rituals create some kind of social bonding among the individuals who
participate in them as well as those who observe them. A fascinating paper by Dimitris Xygalatas and
several co-authors in the August, 2013 issue of Psychological Science presents a field study that provides some
data to back up this proposal.
This study was done in Mauritius. The people there have a number of cultural
identities including their religious identity as Hindu and their national
identity of being Mauritian.
The researchers studied two rituals surrounding the Hindu
festival of Thaipusam. One ritual
involved a period of group singing and prayer.
The second ritual was more extreme.
In this ritual participants were given several piercings on their body,
they had to carry heavy objects, drag a cart attached to their skin with hooks,
and had to climb a mountain barefoot. In
this second ritual, some people perform the ritual, while others observe it and
walk alongside the performers.
Participants were tested either right after the prayer
ritual or right after the extreme ritual. All participants would ultimately
participate in both rituals in some way, so the results do not reflect that
different types of people do the prayer and extreme rituals. The participants were given questions about
their identity to determine whether they identified more as Hindu or more as
Mauritian in that moment. Those involved
in the extreme ritual as performers rated their level of pain. Those involved in the extreme ritual as
observers rated the level of pain they perceived in others.
Finally, at the end of the study, participants were given an
envelope with money (200 rupees, which is a lot of money for these
participants). They were allowed to keep
that money, but were also given the opportunity to donate that money to the
temple. The donations were made in a
private room where the participants were not being observed, but the experimenters
had a way to track the amount of money given by each participant.
The people who
performed the extreme ritual identified most strongly as Mauritian rather than
Hindu. Those who were tested after the
prayer ritual also identified as Mauritian, but much less strongly than those
who performed the extreme ritual. Those
tested after observing the extreme ritual came out in between in their
identity.
The participants who engaged in the extreme ritual as
performers or as observers donated significantly more money to the temple than
those who were tested after the prayer ritual.
The amount of money people gave following the extreme ritual was
correlated with the level of pain they experienced or perceived in others. The more pain, the more that they gave.
This work suggests that extreme rituals have two important
influences on communities. First, they
increase people’s identity with the group, particular at the time that those
rituals are being performed. Second,
they make people more likely to sacrifice their own personal resources for the
group. Participants were paid a lot of
money in this study, and yet those who had just performed the extreme ritual
gave nearly all of it back to the temple.
These benefits are an important reason why cultures keep performing
painful and potentially dangerous rituals.