Original Article
Predictors of hazing motivation in a representative sample of the United States

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2013.08.007Get rights and content

Abstract

Hazing – the abuse of new or prospective group members – remains a puzzling and persistent cross-cultural phenomenon. Aspects of hazing behavior may reflect the operation of psychological adaptations designed to lessen certain forms of ancestral coalitional exploitation. Using a representative sample of the United States, this paper replicates and extends prior findings on predictors of hazing motivation in a university population. Results suggest that probable vectors of ancestral exploitation by newcomers (e.g., freely available group benefits) predict desired hazing severity, and that these effects generalize to a larger and more diverse sample. Findings are discussed in light of hazing's evident complexity and cultural patterning.

Introduction

Why are newcomers to certain kinds of groups subjected to seemingly inexplicable ordeals? That is, why do humans haze? From first-order intuitions, hazing appears puzzling and disadvantageous. Unlike stereotypical bullying, hazing is the abuse of new or prospective group members (hereafter, “newcomers”). And yet hazing is surprisingly common cross-culturally, including small-scale societies and industrialized countries (e.g., Allan and Madden, 2008, Campo et al., 2005, Davis, 1998, Herdt, 1998, Hoover and Pollard, 2000, Linhares de Albuquerque and Paes-Machado, 2004, Pershing, 2006, Shaw, 1992, Webster, 2006).

Cimino (2011) performed the first experimental investigation of hazing motivation on a sample of college undergraduates. Two vignette experiments suggested that aspects of hazing motivation followed an evolutionary logic designed, in part, to discourage newcomer exploitation (detailed below). But to what extent are these experimental results generalizable to non-university populations? Considerable criticism has been leveled at the use of university populations to make inferences about human nature (e.g., Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010; Stanovich, 2004). Especially in the study of hazing, university populations may appear problematic. After all, universities are host to many organizations that haze (e.g., fraternities, sororities, athletic teams, marching bands, clubs). Even if most students do not participate in such activities, perhaps they exist within a “hazing culture” that encourages them to accept and endorse these activities (Iverson & Allan, 2004). Moreover, perhaps measured predictors of hazing motivation in these populations are idiosyncratic and will not generalize to larger, non-university samples. In this study, I replicate and extend the basic findings of Cimino (2011) and demonstrate that a representative sample of United States adults (N = 914) has nearly identical hazing sentiments as students of the University of California, Santa Barbara. Thus, this study represents the first large-scale, experimental study of hazing motivation.

Hazing is defined here as the generation of induction costs (i.e., elements of the experiences necessary to be acknowledged as a “legitimate” group member) that appear unattributable to group-relevant assessments, preparations, or chance (Cimino, 2011). For example, while intense calisthenics appear group-relevant as an assessment or preparation for firefighters, they seem less so for college fraternity members. Hazing may also be manifest in content-appropriate but intentionally excessive assessments or preparations. This definition of hazing is preliminary and operational. It exists only to approximately demarcate the contexts that are most commonly labeled “hazing” and appear to be in need of additional explanation. Theories of hazing are almost always explicit attempts to explain how such induction practices may be group-relevant, even if they appear otherwise (e.g., Cialdini, 2001, Keating et al., 2005).

Throughout the social sciences, most explanations of hazing can be categorized under three macro theories: solidarity, dominance, and commitment. Many researchers have suggested or implied that hazing ordeals increase group solidarity, (e.g., Aronson & Mills, 1959), establish dominance over newcomers (e.g., Keating et al., 2005), or allow for the selection of committed members (e.g., Vigil, 1996). The macro theories do not represent three principled and well-established theories, but rather a way to order a diverse set of claims and speculations regarding hazing's origins and persistence (see review in Cimino, 2011). In actuality, there is little direct scientific evidence for any theory of hazing. And although calling the ideas “macro theories” suggests testability, most claims made about hazing are not formulated in a way that is easily testable. For example, the idea of “group solidarity” may appear straightforward and intuitive, but solidarity's operational entailments are diverse and contested (see reviews in Dion, 2000, Friedkin, 2004, Hogg, 1992).

More importantly, it is not clear that social scientists have a unified representation of what needs to be explained about hazing. The success of any theory of hazing will ultimately depend on its ability to provide more than a plausible account of hazing's effects on hazees. Any successful theory will also need to directly predict hazing's fundamental, core characteristics.

The manifest content of hazing is profoundly variable: Sleep deprivation, intoxication, beatings, calisthenics, servile labor, and scarification are just some of its multitudinous incarnations. Many locally and historically contingent factors are likely at play in the adoption or persistence of specific hazing practices (e.g., cultural transmission biases, see Richerson & Boyd, 2005). But what uniformities are evident beneath this cultural variability? Below I detail four important regularities of hazing that are directly observable and pre-theoretical (cf. Schroeder, 2004). These regularities form a critical part of the explicanda for any theory of hazing.

The hazing ordeals experienced by newcomers do not normally recur later in their tenure. Such ordeals are usually temporary and have a jointly acknowledged point of cessation.

While veterans and newcomers could logically subject one another to the same practices during the induction period, veterans almost never suffer at the hands of newcomers.

Hazees are often coerced into being hazed (e.g., Baier and Williams, 1983, Colton, 1993, Herdt, 1998, Houseman, 2001, Johnson, 2002, Whitehouse, 2005) with some societies treating hazing as an inescapable social obligation (e.g., certain New Guinean secret societies, see Herdt, 1998).

Rather than random aggregations of community members or temporary task groups, hazing is largely found among cooperative alliances that a) are expected to endure across many collective actions and b) have engaged in some collective actions in the past (e.g., secret societies, athletic teams).

Once hazing is viewed in light of these four characteristics, certain common explanations of hazing become less plausible. For example, one solidarity theory of hazing posits that it represents an attempt (conscious or unconscious) to create cognitive dissonance in hazees (e.g., Cialdini, 2001). The basic proposition is that individuals who undergo costly ordeals will attempt to justify their effort by increasing their liking for the hazing group (Aronson & Mills, 1959). But if this is so, why is hazing temporary – if effort justification can increase group liking, why not just continue hazing? Further, why is hazing unidirectional? Would it not be advantageous for veterans to have to further justify their effort by being abused by newcomers? Additionally, given that cognitive dissonance can be diminished by reducing the perception of choice (e.g., Harmon-Jones & Harmon-Jones, 2007), why is hazing so commonly coercive? Why does hazing even exist in environments where hazees have no choice but to participate? And if hazing can increase group liking, why is it concentrated within coalitional groups? After all, group liking has demonstrably positive effects on the efficacy of many task groups (see meta-analysis in Beal, Cohen, Burke, & McLendon, 2003).

Thus, regardless of whether hazing can – or cannot – generate cognitive dissonance (e.g., Lodewijkx & Syroit, 1997), theories that make the effect central to the genesis or persistence of hazing fail to predict basic and recurrent features of the phenomenon.

Why, then, do humans haze? What we presently call “hazing” is likely due to a number of different, separable causal processes. Nonetheless, it may be possible to unpack these processes with sub-theories that can eventually be combined to provide a comprehensive theory of the phenomenon. One reason why hazing occurs may be that the human mind is equipped with psychological mechanisms that motivate the strategic devaluation of coalition newcomers (Cimino and Delton, 2010, Delton and Cimino, 2010). These mechanisms may have evolved because of the adaptive problems posed by coalition newcomers. Below, I detail the stepwise logic behind this sub-theory of hazing.

1) The ability of coalitions to endure across multiple overlapping membership generations was adaptively important throughout many human ancestral environments. This was particularly true for warfare (Bowles, 2009, Tooby and Cosmides, 2010) but also for the realization of shared interests across multiple domains (e.g., Cimino & Delton, 2010; e.g., Delton and Cimino, 2010, Tiger, 1984, Tooby et al., 2006).

2) Enduring coalitions built up group benefits over time (e.g., club goods, common-pool resources), some of which were logically automatic (Cimino and Delton, 2010, Delton and Cimino, 2010), that is, immediately available to newcomers at little or no cost (e.g., status, protection, common property).

3) Because automatic benefits were freely available to newcomers, they were also vulnerable to exploitation strategies by newcomers. These strategies may have included a) temporarily associating with a coalition, consuming automatic benefits until successfully excluded, or b) indefinitely associating with a coalition, but relying on early inaccuracies in the estimation of competence and trustworthiness to engage in higher levels of free riding or other forms of exploitation around group entry. In other words, because lower levels of contribution or higher levels of benefit consumption may be the products of lesser skill or a lack of familiarity with group norms, newcomers were able to manipulate cues that normally disarm anti-free rider punitiveness (e.g., Delton, Cosmides, Guemo, Robertson, & Tooby, 2012). These tactics were more profitable in coalitions with significant automatic benefits.

4) The ability of newcomers to take advantage of automatic benefits made the time period around coalition entry a privileged period for exploitation. For veteran members, it made the entrance of an overlapping membership generation a potential cue of heightened exploitation.

5) Partially in response to these adaptive problems, the human mind was selected to strategically devalue newcomers to enduring coalitions. This strategic devaluation may motivate a constellation of responses toward newcomers, including depressing their ability to benefit from the coalition, advertising an increased willingness to inflict costs, and attempting to enforce labor inputs. (For evidence that real-world hazing includes these features, see General Discussion.) By this theory, certain aspects of hazing were ancestrally adaptive because a) amid a market of prospective members, hazing discouraged a short-term association/exploitation strategy and b) regardless of the existence of a member market, hazing made the abuse of temporary asymmetries in the understanding of newcomer competence and trustworthiness more difficult. Hazing accomplished the former by making the time period around group entry relatively costly. Hazing accomplished the latter by temporarily increasing compliance and conformity in hazees, one product of which was a relative reduction in exploitative behaviors (see General Discussion). Hazing provided direct fitness benefits to hazers by augmenting the coalition's ability to generate benefits (by increasing labor inputs and decreasing free riding in newcomers) and preventing the decline of cooperation that occurs when successful free riding is present or assumed to be present (e.g., Fehr & Gachter, 2000).

From the perspective of automatic accrual theory, hazing is temporary because it reflects the operation of mechanisms designed to solve exploitation problems that attenuate over time. That is, over time, the accuracy of veteran estimations of newcomer trustworthiness and competence increases, reducing the need for hazing. Hazing is unidirectional because the adaptive problem it addresses is inherently asymmetric from the standpoint of veterans: Newcomer status is a vector for exploitation (e.g., Cimino and Delton, 2010, Moreland and Levine, 2002), and the value of newcomers as coalition members is (compared to veterans) relatively unproven. Hazing is coercive because the ordeals suffered by hazees are, in part, attempts at gross behavioral regulation and domination during a period of otherwise heightened exploitation (e.g., Stone, 1946, Webster, 2006, Whiting et al., 1958). Finally, hazing is coalitional because it was principally enduring coalitions that built up large automatic benefits and thus were most vulnerable to newcomer exploitation. In sum, automatic accrual theory makes predictions that are consistent with – and may partially explicate – hazing's key regularities.

Automatic accrual theory is a logical elaboration of many theories and hypotheses relevant to – but not necessarily focused on – hazing (e.g., Boyer, 2001, Iannaccone, 1992, Moreland and Levine, 2002, Sosis et al., 2007, Tiger, 1984, Vigil, 1996). Like other, similar ideas, automatic accrual theory implies that hazing is partly a coalitional anti-free rider strategy. The goal of automatic accrual theory is to provide a detailed evolutionary account of some of the selection pressures that might favor the evolution of hazing behaviors, make precise predictions about the cues that will motivate hazing at the individual level (i.e., the perception of automatic but not non-automatic benefits) and help explain the existence of a focused period of dominance surrounding hazing ordeals. Additionally, automatic accrual theory is explicitly designed to be experimentally testable using standard psychological methods.

Cimino (2011) tested and found evidence consistent with four basic predictions of automatic accrual theory:

  • 1.

    Because strongly cooperative groups generate high levels of automatic benefits, membership in such a group will motivate greater hazing severity than membership in a weakly cooperative group. In other words, the predicted difference in hazing severity between these group types will be mediated via differences in automatic benefits.

  • 2.

    If one function of hazing is to prevent the exploitation of automatic benefits, non-automatic benefits will predict no unique variance in hazing severity when automatic benefits are statistically controlled.

  • 3.

    Because being a high contributor to a group entails disproportionate contribution to the maintenance of automatic benefits, members with high levels of contribution will haze more severely than members with low levels of contribution. Note that prior work on punishment suggests that high contributors are more willing to punish free riders (e.g., Price, Cosmides, & Tooby, 2002). By this logic, high contributors should be more willing to haze potential free riders as well.

  • 4.

    If hazing is designed, in part, to create costs that prevent or discourage near-term exploitation, hazers should be increasingly willing to coercively inflict these costs as the chance of exploitation increases. In other words, if hazing severity reflects the likelihood of exploitation by newcomers, it will positively predict hazing coerciveness.

The primary goal of this paper is to attempt to replicate these four findings on a large, diverse, non-university population.

Section snippets

Participants

All participants were members of Knowledge Networks' online research panel in April of 2006. This panel is designed to provide a representative sampling of the United States population. Panel members were recruited using Random Digit Dialing (RDD) and offered internet access in exchange for their participation in the panel. Individuals who did not have a computer were given WebTV devices. Aspects of Knowledge Networks' sampling methodology cause slight deviations from representativeness (e.g.,

Results

All predictions (save those specified below) were tested using standard multiple regressions. Interaction variables were tested using hierarchical entry to isolate their statistical effects. Because there are a variety of sex-differentiated aspects of coalitional psychology (e.g., Tiger, 1984, Tooby and Cosmides, 2010), sex was tested as a moderator on all non-control variables. Potential interactions with sex were first tested individually. Conventionally significant interactions were then

General discussion

In prior experiments with a university population, hazing motivation appeared to follow an adaptive logic designed to reduce newcomer exploitation (Cimino, 2011). In the current experiment, using a representative sample of the United States, hazing motivation was almost identically patterned. Participants that imagined themselves as members of a strongly cooperative, enduring coalition desired more severe hazing. Variance in the coalition's perceived automatic benefits – but not non-automatic

Supplementary Materials

The following is the Supplementary data to this article.

Cimino 2012 - Stimuli Revised

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    Author Note: Aldo Cimino, Center For Evolutionary Psychology, Department of Anthropology, University of California, Santa Barbara. Data collected by Time-sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences, NSF Grant 0818839, Jeremy Freese and Penny Visser, Principal Investigators. Helpful suggestions were provided by Nancy Collins, Andrew W. Delton, and Xenia Cimino.

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