Professor Harvey Whitehouse is Chair of Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford and Director of the Centre for the Study of Social Cohesion. One of the world’s leading experts on the evolutionary basis of human culture, Whitehouse has spent four decades studying some of the most extreme groups on earth: from the battlefields of the Arab Spring, via millenarian cults on Pacific islands, to violent football fans in South America. Along the way, he has undertaken research at some of the world’s most important archaeological sites, brain-scanning facilities, and child psychology labs – all with a view to pioneering a new, scientific approach to the study of human society.
In 1987, Harvey Whitehouse went to live with an indigenous community deep in the Papua New Guinea rainforest. His experiences there convinced him that, far from being wildly different, humans are fundamentally alike: their beliefs and behaviours rooted in a set of evolutionary urges that can be found in any society, anywhere. In his recent book Inheritance (US Link), Whitehouse roves across twelve millennia and five continents to uncover how these evolved urges have both shaped and been reshaped by human history. Along the way, he shows that this ancient inheritance does not just hold the key to explaining the modern world – but perhaps also to changing it.
Q: Why is ritual so important to us, as a species?
[Harvey Whitehouse]: Well, I have to admit I never really liked rituals as a child, particularly the rituals in my school, for example—I found them quite oppressive in some ways. And I didn’t come to understand until quite late in my development that rituals are quite important for bonding groups together and motivating cooperation. They’re not just important in our own society—they’re important in every human society, as far as we can tell, going back into deep history and prehistory. And so they are part of our collective inheritance – which is the central topic of my book.
Rituals are basically conventional forms of behaviour – the stuff that fashions and traditions are made of. They include things like etiquette and custom and basically doing things the done and proper way. Dressing yourself in the right fashion and coordinating your actions with other people in special, distinctive settings—that kind of thing. And they can vary a lot in scale, from really small-scale things like tea ceremonies and things we do in family shrines—right the way through to vast festivals and ceremonies of state. They take the form of rites of passage too, of course—things like birthing rituals and weddings and funerals. And some cultures have some special initiation rituals and calendrical rituals to celebrate key moments in the agricultural cycle—that kind of thing. They vary a lot, but the thing is rituals are universal, and at the same time, they’re the building blocks of cultural diversity, of traditions that make us distinct from one another.
I’m particularly interested in the human propensity to copy behaviours that lack any kind of knowable causal structure. This is how we learn arbitrary conventions—and I think it originates in a distinctively human way of building group identities.
Think of Catholic self-crossing, for example. It’s obviously marking out the shape of a crucifix—and it tells you straight away that the person doing it is a Christian. But it doesn’t actually cause anything to happen—it’s not like picking berries from a bush or walking from A to B or any other action in which the behaviour leads to some kind of palpable end goal. There’s nothing instrumental about self-crossing—it’s just a convention, something you learn to do by copying other people, but with no rational causal process involved and no obviously useful outcome.
I describe ritual actions as causally opaque. And my colleagues and I have run a variety of experiments showing that from a very early age we copy causally opaque behaviour more fastidiously than instrumental behaviour!
We also have some pretty good evidence that the motivation to engage in that kind of copying is to affiliate with other people in the group—to blend in and be accepted as a group member alongside everyone else.
In fact, we engage in this kind of behaviour even more enthusiastically when we’re anxious about being excluded or left out.
Q: So, what exactly is it that makes something a ‘ritual’?
[Harvey Whitehouse]: Well, it’s a bit of a slippery term, ‘ritual’, actually. My colleagues and I who study ritual like to break it up into component elements—we call it fractionating the phenomenon. Ritual fractionates into a number of different dimensions, all of which may have quite distinct evolutionary histories and functions, but we sort of smoosh it all together under this general heading of ritual. But I would differentiate, for example, the habit of doing things in synchrony. Social synchrony is a big feature of human behaviour—it’s a weird thing if you think about it, but we do things like marching in time and parading and singing in choirs in ways that are highly coordinated and synchronised. We do all kinds of synchronous stuff, and we often do it in big ceremonies, and it’s very impressive. But one of the psychological effects of that is it can blur the boundaries between self and group and create this feeling that you are the group, and the group is you. And this obviously has the capacity to promote quite strong forms of pro-group action. The effect doesn’t last very long—you have to keep doing it all the time, which is why I think military groups do these drilling and parading things constantly, if you want to keep up the effect.
But that’s only one feature – there are so many features of ritual. For example, another feature that some of my colleagues have studied is the human obsession in certain contexts with cleaning and separating, symmetry and exactness and threshold and entrance and things like that. Those are the things that people with OCD get very concerned about. And it looks like obsessive-compulsive disorder is an exaggerated version of what is actually quite a widespread human experience. If you look at the list of OCD symptoms and you look at the common features of cultural rituals around the world, they’re very similar.
There’s also what my colleagues call the costly signalling aspect. Rituals are often pretty costly in many ways—people put a lot of resources and effort and time into them. They can be painful or dangerous as well as expensive or time consuming, so there are lots of ways in which rituals can be costly. Participating in those kinds of rituals could signal your commitment to the group.
But the thing about ritual that fascinates me particularly is the causally opaque aspect I mentioned a little earlier. Rituals are causally opaque in a way that other things, like the watch I’m wearing, isn’t. I don’t know how it works, actually, it’s one of those Apple watches. There’s all this stuff around us that I don’t really understand – their inner workings are a mystery to me. But I assume that there are people in the world who do understand how my watch works. Rituals are causally opaque in a slightly different way—in that we assume that nobody could tell you what the rational causal structure of the opaque action is. Instead they’d tell you it symbolic, or magical, or just the custom, or maybe even that nobody really knows. It’s not like an instrumental behaviour or a mechanical object. Rituals are irremediably opaque. The desire to copy that kind of behaviour is very early developing, and it’s a very striking feature of human nature.
Q: Are rituals necessary for complex society to work?
Yes, all societies need rituals, but I think complex societies needed repetitive rituals in order to get off the ground. Routinizing rituals (doing them very frequently—e.g. daily or weekly) makes deviations from the standard script easy to detect. And this means that when people step out of line, they can be sanctioned.
Some of the earliest evidence for increasingly routinized rituals comes from Çatalhöyük in central Anatolia, in what is now modern Turkey. This is one of the first regions on Earth where farming emerged and spread.
At Çatalhöyük, people were beginning to plant crops (such as wheat and barley) and to domesticate animals (initially sheep and goat, and eventually cattle).
I went to stay at this site many years running, in order to work with the director of the excavations—Ian Hodder, from Stanford University.
Hodder and I came to the conclusion that over the nearly two thousand years of settlement at Çatalhöyük, the ritual life was changing.
In particular, rituals associated with domestic spaces and farming practices were becoming more frequent—and the more ancient, sporadic rituals associated with hunting and feasting were dying out.
And as rituals became more frequent, many features of the cultural system grew more standardized—for example, stamp seals and pottery designs started to look more similar and spread to larger and larger groups. As a result, the first really large-scale cultural traditions were starting to emerge.
And together with my collaborators, we have since found evidence for similar patterns across scores of other archaeological sites spanning this period in prehistory.
The power of routinization is that it allows you to spread a shared set of identity markers to a large population—and to do so very quickly. All you need is a handful of proselytizing leaders willing to travel from village to village, spreading the same ideas and behaviours, and you can soon create a vast tradition encompassing hundreds of communities. And you can stabilize and maintain that tradition over time by repeating the beliefs and practices very frequently.
Q: What is the role of self-sacrifice in society?
[Harvey Whitehouse]: It’s an interesting question, isn’t it? Self-sacrificial behaviour presents an evolutionary puzzle. Arguably the most obvious explanation is kin selection—for example, willingness to make the ultimate sacrifice so that carriers of your genes can survive and reproduce.
Many animals show extraordinary courage when it comes to protecting their offspring. For example, some birds will feign a broken wing to lure a predator away from their vulnerable offspring.
In human groups, self-sacrificial behaviour is commonly linked to feelings of psychological kinship. It’s no accident that soldiers often describe themselves as ‘brothers in arms’—or that many loyal groups claim to be descended from common ancestors.
Q: What about the concept of shared essence, and fusion?
[Harvey Whitehouse] Fusion – or ‘identity fusion’ to be more precise – is basically a form of group alignment in which essential features of your personal identity are felt to be shared with the group.
Those essential features can be part of your personal life history and therefore your autobiographical memories, or they can be experienced as part of your physical, biological makeup.
What this means is that there are basically two ways of becoming fused. One is to undergo an experience that becomes a core feature of who you are – such as a painful or frightening ordeal, like fighting together on the battlefield or undergoing an agonizing initiation ritual. When experiences like these become not only part of your personal identity but are also felt to be group-defining, your personal and group identities become effectively fused together.
Another way of becoming fused is to believe that you are made of the same physical substance as other group members. For example, people in the same family typically think they share the same blood, or facial features, or other physical traits. Even though different cultures have different ways of conceptualizing shared biology within families, the underlying psychology is always fundamentally the same. For example, people always assume that these shared traits – whatever they may be – are passed down from parents to offspring. Often, this notion of shared biology is scaled up so that members of the same tribe believe they are descended from common ancestors, or they might think of their territory as a shared motherland.
In large studies of twins, we’ve shown that both these elements contribute to feelings of fusion among siblings. For example, we’ve found that identical twins are more fused than fraternal twins based on feeling more similar biologically. But independently of those effects, twins who think they have been profoundly shaped by the same life experiences become fused that way as well.
Q: Can your understanding of tribalism and ritual help us understand war?
[Harvey Whitehouse]: Well, going back to the fusion mechanisms we’ve been discussing, if you’re fused with your group and somebody attacks it, you take it personally and you feel very motivated to protect your fellow group members. But it’s important to emphasize right away that fusion is not necessarily a bad thing—it doesn’t necessarily produce violent outcomes at all. In fact, the group that most people are fused with around the world would be their family. And loving your family does not mean hating other families. Tribalism is basically just loyalty to the group—and you could think of fusion as just a very strong and pure form of loyalty, a sort of intense feeling of love for the group. But when tribalism turns violent, it’s because people think their group is threatened and that lethal force is needed to protect their comrades.
We’ve done a lot of research with various kinds of violent groups—from armed insurgents to football hooligans—and we’ve repeatedly found that a combination of fusion and perceived threat underlies their commitment to intergroup conflict.
But there are also two other factors that, together with fusion and outgroup threat, lead to extreme forms of pro-group behaviour—including violent self-sacrifice. This is something I’ve worked on a lot with my colleague Julia Ebner, who’s an expert on various kinds of extremist groups.
These two other factors are, firstly, demonisation of the enemy – the feeling that the enemy is beyond the pale, inhuman, demonic; and secondly the conviction that violence is the only solution, you can’t find a peaceful way out. All four features together constitute the formula for violent extremism.
Julia and I have been analysing the language used by political activists, hunting for tell-tale indicators of this mixture of ingredients – fusion, threat, dehumanization, and willingness to use violence. What we found was that the killers in our sample were far more likely to exhibit all four features of this deadly cocktail in the language they used than those who were non-violent – even those who subscribed to extremist ideologies. So ideological extremism alone is not the driver of violence—the roots of it lie in a combination of our four key factors. This award-winning research is now helping the intelligence community in the UK and Germany and also internet platforms to spot would-be terrorists through their online communications.
And now Julia and I are applying the same approach to the speeches of authoritarian leaders. We’re currently carrying out a big study of such leaders over the past 120 years, focusing on the language they use as a window into their psychology. And we’re finding that the leaders who committed the worst atrocities in human history are mostly those who exhibit this same deadly cocktail of ingredients. Our aim is to use these techniques to predict better which of the world’s current authoritarian leaders will be next to unleash mass violence against their perceived enemies.
Q: Can we therefore use this understanding to defuse conflict and engage in peacebuilding?
[Harvey Whitehouse]: Yes, I think there are several ways in which our research could help us defuse conflict.
First, we can use the methods I’ve described to develop diagnostic tools for early detection of risk from violent extremists and authoritarian leaders. Early warning systems are clearly an important part of heading off violence before it’s too late.
Second, we could potentially use experiences of shared essence across groups to create fusion at a superordinate level, to heal divisions and foster peacebuilding. We’ve carried out a number of studies showing that simply reminding people that all of us descend from common ancestors—or that all of us have common experiences of grief and loss—is sufficient to increase fusion with humanity at large and (crucially) our willingness to act on that to address global problems.
For example, in one of our studies, we measured the effects of exposure to a speech in which a UK politician talked about suffering on both sides of the conflict in Gaza. We found that just listening to the speech made Jewish and Muslim participants in our study more fused with the opposing side in the war and had other positive impacts on their attitudes that would likely make them more willing to support peaceful solutions to the conflict.
Building on those ideas, it’s easy to imagine how bridging algorithms could be created to increase people’s exposure to outgroup suffering whenever they’re viewing content online.
This could be done in a way that doesn’t conflict with commercial interests—which would be crucial to getting interventions like this off the ground.
Third, fostering barrier-crossing leaders is a really important thing. We need more leaders who recognize shared suffering on both sides of intergroup conflicts. We’ve done some fascinating studies of barrier-crossing leaders across a variety of different countries. For example, in one of these studies we interviewed Muslim leaders in London, leaders of traveller communities in Ireland, and African-American leaders in Louisiana—these are all groups that have just grievances of various kinds. Roughly half the leaders we interviewed were what we call barrier-bound leaders—who just focus on the sufferings of their ingroup. But the other half of our sample were what we call barrier-crossing leaders, who recognise shared suffering on both sides of any conflict and who are highly motivated to solve problems in ways that make everyone better off, not just members of their own group. If we want to live in a more peaceful and cooperative world, those are the kinds of leaders we need.
Q: How can understanding human nature help us understand capitalism and the economy?
[Harvey Whitehouse]: Well the first thing to say is that there’s nothing natural about capitalism. We managed fine without it for most of our history and prehistory. In recent times some societies have tried to get rid of it – for example in the USSR and the People’s Republic of China. And of course, many other countries experimented with communist regimes of various kinds. But none of those experiments was very successful. I think we’re more likely to overcome the problems inherent in capitalism by changing our consumer behaviour in ways that don’t require violent class conflict and revolutions.
The main problem with capitalism is that, without adequate regulation, it leads to unjust wealth distributions and unsustainable forms of consumerism. Obviously, these are issues that require structural solutions, but they also require changes to our lifestyles and our attitudes to the future. In other words, I think we all have a part to play in making capitalism more ethical and sustainable.
Rituals could play a very important part in this. This is a problem, actually, because collective rituals are currently going into decline. This decline isn’t limited to secularizing countries in North America and parts of Europe. In fact, even in countries where religion is on the rise, there’s evidence that regular attendance at religious rituals is declining.
This general pattern can be seen across many different spheres of modern life.
In our domestic lives, for example, we are less likely than ever before in human history to engage in highly routinized domestic rituals such as family mealtimes.
Our ideas about formal education are increasingly focused on instrumental outcomes such as exam results and league tables.
Our workplaces are likewise organized increasingly around audit culture and maximizing efficiency. Working hours are becoming more flexible and less synchronized, and factory production lines are becoming more automated.
At the same time as more old-fashioned forms of cohesion have gone into decline, new varieties of conformism have become established in their place.
Advertising is now increasingly shaped by algorithms that track what kind of content we like to view on the internet and accordingly direct us towards more and more of it. In effect, our consumption of products and ideas is being herded in ways that suit commercial interests rather than the interests of society at large.
However, I would argue that there are many ways in which we could manage our ritualistic tendencies more productively. For example, in our schools, we could use classes and assemblies to embed more environmentally friendly practices. In the world of work, we could also develop new traditions celebrating purposeful capitalism. By focusing more on the prosocial contributions of people’s jobs, we could also make working life more motivating.
Government and public sector canteens could routinize more sustainable forms of food consumption. In our homes too, we could create stronger norms and traditions renewing commitment to values like inclusivity and global citizenship.
Harnessing our natural conformism in these ways is basically how past civilizations scaled up cooperation. And now we need to adapt that knowledge to new circumstances.
Q: How does religiosity help us understand advertising & social media?
[Harvey Whitehouse]: I devote a lot of space in the book to describing how our religious intuitions are constantly being hijacked by advertisers to sell us products – from techniques like brand anthropomorphism (in which advertisers make products feel like people), to tapping into our intuitions about magical remedies in the cosmetics industry.
I also argue that the news media exploit our moral intuitions in ways that are quite harmful to us. What they do is interestingly different from the way moralizing religions have traditionally worked.
What the moralizing religions have done historically is to try to persuade us that good deeds will be rewarded and wickedness punished.
Companies also manipulate our moral intuitions in order to influence our behaviour, but they do it indirectly – for example, through the medium of news feeds.
When news providers sell us stories about the moral transgressions of others – whether it’s the grisly details of violent crimes, the horrors of warfare, or the scandalous behaviour of the rich and powerful – they are also selling advertising space.
This increases the impression that our societies are increasingly unsafe and unjust, and that our leaders and our institutions are not to be trusted. While things may be getting worse in some of these ways, the danger is that negative impressions become exaggerated and unbalanced, undermining cohesion and cooperation.
Basically, I’d argue that the past few thousand years have been defined by a process in which our religious and moral intuitions were brought together in a way that enabled us to cooperate on ever-larger scales. But nowadays, things are rapidly moving in the opposite direction, insofar as our religious and moral intuitions are being corralled by commercial interests in ways that have divisive effects. Populists, conspiracy theorists, and disrupters of various kinds can easily take advantage of this.
Instead, I actually think we could lean into organized religions more than we currently do to address things like intergroup conflict and destruction of the environment. All the world religions provide scriptural support for tolerance and compassion towards others, and stewardship of the planet. The vast majority of human beings in the world today align with a religious organization. And religious organizations have a huge impact on people’s attitudes, diets, and lifestyles.
Religious groups are also a very important source of cohesion, often based on narratives of shared suffering – focusing on the sufferings of central figures, such as the world-renouncing ordeals of the Buddha or of Christ on the cross. And of course, religions also create feelings of shared suffering through arduous rituals, or experiences of sectarian violence, or histories of oppression. And yet, very few religious leaders, governments, or international bodies are asking how we can harness the cohesive power of religions to slow the pace of climate change and to prevent conflict.
Q: Can we create a global tribe?
[Harvey Whitehouse]: Yes, we can. I think we’re capable of building a much, much larger tribe that encompasses all of humanity. That is within reach for us psychologically—it is psychologically possible. 10,000 years ago, it would be impossible to imagine being loyal to a nation of millions of people. It would be unthinkable. But we now know that it’s possible for people to bond on those scales through nationalism and patriotism and so on, and to love their countries and these huge imagined communities. There’s nothing qualitatively different about the idea of being bonded that way with humanity at large. We just don’t have the institutional supports for it. But what it would require psychologically is beginning to become clearer.
We’ve carried out experiments showing how it’s possible to become fused with humanity at large by appreciating that we’re all descended from the same ancestors. That’s a form of psychological kinship that could bind us all together. There are also some shared experiences that go deep for all of us as human beings, that can provide a foundation for fusion with humanity at large. So all of those things are psychologically possible. The trouble is, right now the direction of travel is away from the global order that had been built up. I would like to see more efforts to reverse that, and to try to build stronger global institutions that foster forms of global identity and global fusion and cooperation. In the book I argue that we could build a ‘teratribe’, by which I mean a sort of monster-tribe—bigger than all the megatribes of history—a tribe big enough to encompass all of humanity and potentially all forms of life.
None of this would prevent us from continuing to align with much more parochial groups. I imagine our families will probably always be the most important tribes we belong to, and maybe our religions, football teams, countries, and ethnic identities will also continue to matter long into the future. And that’s all fine. But I also think the global tribe matters—and we should learn to care more about that than we do at present.
I first started thinking about this as a result of an incident that occurred while I was living deep in the rainforest of PNG for two years, as part of my doctoral research. To add to the sense of drama, it happened during a terrible storm, when we were all huddling together in the village meeting house, and I first heard the story of a time when a cyclone struck Queensland in Australia. My friends in the village had been saving up all the money they could raise from cash crops, with the idea of supporting a community project—perhaps a school or aid post. But when they heard of the sufferings of rich Australians across the sea, they decided to give away a huge portion of their savings to provide them with assistance. When I tried to dig into why, the best answer I could get was that we are all descended from the same ancestors—which makes us all family. And helping out is what you do when your family needs you.
If people living in a remote part of the rainforest can view humanity as one giant family, then surely that is possible for the rest of us as well. To investigate that idea empirically, Lukas Reinhardt and I set up an experiment in which participants were shown a video in which the journalist A.J. Jacobs explained that all of us are descended from common ancestors and therefore that all human beings constitute a single family. By making our shared biology so salient, this video significantly increased levels of fusion with humanity at large, compared with the control condition in which fusion was measured before rather than after watching the video. We have also shown that shared experiences of motherhood increase feelings of fusion towards women in faraway countries. In all these studies—whether the key factor was shared ancestry or common experiences—feelings of shared essence and fusion with other human beings around the world were also shown to motivate action, in the form of donations to global charities.
Now that we are finally beginning to understand the psychology needed to solve global collective action problems, I believe we need to apply that knowledge to the way we do business, run our countries, and manage our natural resources. My book offers some starting points, but the real challenge will be to put those ideas into practice. That’s going to take more than a bunch of like-minded academics. It’s going to need input from politicians, religious leaders, activists from all countries, all backgrounds, all age-groups, and all cultural groups. Our ancestors never gave up and nor should we. They left us a legacy we can build on, if we take the time to understand it and recognize what we can do with it.