Keg stands and paddle boards, forever associated with inductions into well known exclusive
organizations, but they can get pretty brutal.
So why do people go through with it?
Hey guys Julia here for DNews.
Initiation rites seem as old as time.
Thousands of cultures participate in some variation of them.
Here in America, we often associate them with sports teams, social groups, Greek organizations
on college campuses, or the military.
Bullying is as old as we are too.
It’s when someone who is in a position of power abuses someone beneath them.
Put them together and you get hazing.
Hazing is defined by Ramapo Journal of Law and Society as “…any activity, required
implicitly or explicitly as a condition of initiation or continued membership in an organization,
that may negatively impact the physical or psychological well-being.”
Hazing…is like bullying but it’s a little weird.
Here's a direct quote from a researcher, "It's very rare for bullies to say, 'I'm going to
bully you for three months, but after that we're going to be bros,' but that's the sort
of thing that happens with hazing."
Hazing isn’t fun, it’s not.
But that’s not what you might hear coming out of the mouths of recent pledges.
And that’s because they’ve convinced themselves they’re enjoying it.
I once had a friend in a frat, sorry he would be mad if I said that, I should call it a
fraternity, who said he participated in hazing because “shared PTSD makes you closer.”
What?
Well he’s not entirely wrong.
Sharing something brings people together, whether it’s a meal, a victory, and yes,
even being hazed.
When you think of hazing you think of a few things.
Drinking games and embarrassing dares, like having intimate relations with a pig.
And turns out, it’s really effective in making people want to join a group and in
making people really like the group their joining.
Social psychology explains that hazing produces cognitive dissonance - which is the mental
stress you feel when dealing with two contradictory beliefs.
Early social psychology says that pledges try to dispel that dissonance from hazing
in two ways.
“He can convince himself that the initiation was not very unpleasant, or he can exaggerate
the positive characteristics of the group and minimize its negative aspects”.
And the more unpleasant the initiation is, the less they can convince himself of the
former, so they have to exaggerate the latter.
One famous 1959 psychology study found that people liked the group they joined more if
they did something embarrassing to get in.
In this study researchers had college women try to get into a book club.
Some women went through severe initiation, some went through a mild initiation, and some
went through none at all.
But “severe” in this case was to read obscene words out loud, and also read aloud
two vivid descriptions of sexual activity from contemporary novels.
But hey it was the 50s, so that was DOWNRIGHT SCANDALOUS.
Anyway, the researchers found that those who went through the severe initiation rated the
group as significantly more attractive than those women who went through other initiations.
Basically the harder it was to get into a group the more they claimed they liked it.
And the harder the initiation, the greater the dissonance, and the more they fight it…
by liking it.
So basically your brain is like “Wow this sucks, why did I do this?
You know what, this club must be really cool to get into”.
Hazing also forges these strong bonds between pledges by wearing down their sense of individual
identity.
It can be physical OR psychological.
Because when people in a group are faced with a threat, they rely more on the group and
look for group promoting behavior.
So basically you look around during something traumatic and make sure everyone is in it
together.
This kind of shared trauma creates an intense bond with other pledges and creates a distance
between themselves and non-group members.
Basically it creates a kind of us-vs-them mentality among pledges and the veteran members.
And the experience of hazing itself, or ‘maltreatment’ at some researchers call it, makes pledges
feel dependent on the group, cognitively, socially, and emotionally.
Because of what they went through together, they now depend on the group for opinions
and validation.
You probably won’t be surprised to learn there are some downsides to hazing.
One study published in the journal Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice found that
undergrads who went through hazing had low self esteem, rely on peers more, don’t like
to be left alone.
So while hazing and severe initiation might be unpleasant and potentially dangerous, it
does exactly what it’s designed to do.
It wears identity down, strengthens bonds with group members, convinces you that getting
abused is fun, and increases the prestige of the team or group that you’re joining.
To get a little more background on how fraternities and sororities became a common part of college
life, check out this video from Test Tube News.
So have you ever been hazed?
Let us know down in the comments below