coeds were required to endure pain rather than embarrassment to get
into a group. The more electric shock a woman received as part of the
initiation ceremony, the more she later persuaded herself that her new
group and its activities were interesting, intelligent, and desirable.^15
Now the harassments, the exertions, even the beatings of initiation
rituals begin to make sense. The Thonga tribesman watching, with tears
in his eyes, his ten-year-old son tremble through a night on the cold
ground of the “yard of mysteries,” 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 troublesome initiation
rites. The loyalty and dedication of those who emerge will increase to
a great degree 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 were those with the greatest
group solidarity.^16 Given Aronson and Mills’s demonstration that the
severity of an initiation ceremony significantly heightens the newcomer’s
commitment to the group, it is hardly surprising that groups will oppose
all attempts to eliminate this crucial link to their future strength.
Military groups and organizations are by no means exempt from
these same processes. The agonies of “boot camp” initiations to the
armed services are legendary. The novelist William Styron, a former
Marine, catalogs his own experiences in language we could easily apply
to the Thongas (or, for that matter, to the Kappas or Betas or Alphas):
“the remorseless close-order drill hour after hour in the burning sun,
the mental and physical abuse, the humiliations, the frequent sadism
at the hands of drill sergeants, all the claustrophobic and terrifying in-
sults to the spirit which can make an outpost like Quantico or Parris
Island one of the closest things in the free world to a concentration
camp.” But, in his commentary, Styron does more than recount the
misery of this “training nightmare”—he recognizes its intended out-
come: “There is no ex-Marine of my acquaintance, regardless of what
direction he may have taken spiritually or politically after those callow
gung-ho days, who does not view the training as a crucible out of which
he emerged in some way more resilient, simply braver and better for
the wear.”
But why should we believe William Styron, the writer, in such mat-
ters? After all, for professional storytellers, the line between truth and
fiction is often blurred. Indeed, why should we believe him when he
alleges that the “infernal” character of his military training was not only
Robert B. Cialdini Ph.D / 69