Infrequently, we hear of American students who are injured or killed due to hazing rites performed during fraternity and sorority initiations on university campuses. These incidents take the form of extreme and unusual tests that are meant to determine the loyalty and endurance of the pledging member to their new social groups.

Harsher initiation trials exacted upon Greek-letter pledges can take the form of physical punishments, exposure to cold, lengthy incarcerations without food or drink, and the forced performance of bizarre or dangerous acts. Most of the time, these initiations are performed more ritualistically and with moderation. But things do go awry at times. The likelihood of harm increases when the people supervising such events are too enthusiastic, heavy-handed, and lacking in judgement to understand or recognize the boundary between ceremony and abuse.

For many years now, university administrations have tried to force fraternities and sororities to severely limit, or renounce, initiation and hazing rituals, unsuccessfully. Even under the most stringent school rules and pressures, these rites still persist quietly under the radar, as if they are somehow hardwired in human behaviour. Not even the safetyism zeitgeist on school campuses has been able to fundamentally thwart these hazing tendencies.

Much the same thing occurs in the ranks of sports teams and in militaries around the world, which are another form of exclusive “tribal” society. In autocratic countries where corruption is rife and discipline within the army ranks is weak, rogue soldiers have been known to brutalize newer recruits. But even the basic training programmes of the most democratic, law-abiding and disciplined militaries can be likened to a societally sanctioned form of hazing. Medical residents and articling law students go through their own ceremonial period of servile work exploitation in their adoptive professions, which also a milder form of the same practice.

The public perception and popular explanation for hazing tends to be simplistic and excessively judgemental: hazing is bullying, masculine aggression and power-driven horseplay performed by sadistic minds with small IQs. That may be the case in rare individual circumstances. But one problem with this explanation is that it fails to get at the hidden root cause of the human tendency for closed and tribal societies to initiate its members—including the countless traditional societies that have done so since time immemorial.

Social psychologist Robert Cialdini, in his book, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion shatters, in my view, the mystery of what does, and doesn’t, lie behind hazing and initiation behaviors in university fraternities and other exclusive groups. 

First, concerning the administrators of initiation rituals, Cialdini writes: 

“The picture that emerges of the perpetrators of hazing practices is of normal individuals who tend to be psychologically stable and socially concerned but who become aberrantly harsh as a group at only one time—immediately before the admission of new members to the society. The evidence points to the ceremony as culprit. There must be something about its rigors that is vital to the group.”

Cialdini goes on to cite research that convincingly shows that when people experience difficulty, discomfort, or suffering to attain something, such as, in this case, acceptance into an exclusive group, they tend to value the group more afterwards than if they didn’t experience difficulty—or if they encountered less of it.

The implication? Group hazing and initiation is likely an evolved and unconscious behaviour designed to increase social cohesion and a sense of group worth within tight-knit societies. Cialdini goes on:

Now the harassments, the exertions, and even the beatings of initiation rituals begin to make sense. The Thonga tribesman with tears in his eyes, watching his ten-year-old son tremble through a night on the cold ground of the ‘yard of mysteries’ and the college sophomore punctuating his Hell Night paddling of his fraternity ‘little brother’ with bursts of nervous laughter—these are not acts of sadism. They are acts of group survival. They function, oddly enough, to spur future society members to find the group more attractive and worthwhile. As long as it is the case that people like and believe in what they have struggled to get, these groups will continue to arrange effortful and trying initiation rites. The loyalty and dedication of those who emerge will greatly increase the chances of group cohesiveness and survival. Indeed, one study of fifty-four tribal cultures found that those with the most dramatic and stringent initiation ceremonies had the greatest group solidarity.

All of this explains why hazing has been so resilient and difficult to eradicate on university campuses: it is hardwired in us at some level. It lies, like so much else in our lives, below conscious awareness, hidden from view—which is why we can only explain it away as aberrant behaviour. The fact that our modern western culture lacks meaningful rites of passage compared with other cultures, perhaps makes such behaviours all the more pervasive.

What Cialdini doesn’t mention is that not all initiation rites, whether performed today or in the past, have involved the use of hazing. Initiation ceremonies are meant to reflect the deeper meaning that comes with the acceptance of new members into a group—especially where the values enshrined by the accepting body are concerned.

Whether the early Greek-letter societies of the 1800s—which were nodes of higher intellectual and moral pursuit on campus—went to such hazing extremes is a question that’s worth investigating. We may discover that today’s forms of fraternity hazing are a deteriorated version of more high-minded and less physical induction rites from the past .

If those who engage in these campus rituals understood their unconscious motivations better, they might become more vigilant about preventing their initiations from going into mindless and hazardous autopilot. Such knowledge would be a natural counterweight to the heavy-handedness that can occur, and which on occasion needlessly causes tragic deaths, injuries and trouble with the law.