Estimated Costs and Benefits of Extreme Rituals in Mauritius
Why do people willingly engage in painful or exhausting rituals with no obvious material reward?
Outgroup threat and group cohesion
Generally, threat increases the human tendency to help other in-group members. An international team lead by Martin Lang experimentally tested the influence of outgroup and environmental threats on the process of forming cohesive groups in Brazil, Japan, Mauritius, New Zealand, Singapore, and Spain.
Using a novel tool called sociometric badge, the authors measured activity, proximity between individuals, and their movement mimicry in four-person groups during a task aimed at mitigating the respective threat. Lang et al. show both cross-cultural variation in the process of forming cohesive groups as well as the effect of both threats. Women and men reacted to the threats of environmental catastrophes with increased cohesion and activity, but only men reacted to the outgroup threat of terrorism. The results are in accord with previous theories which point out that intergroup conflict is mostly a male domain, and also show how threats influence subconscious behavioral processes which help build cohesive groups.
You can find the article here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/13684302211016961
