ban sex, you can’t prohibit alcohol, and you probably can’t eliminate
hazing!”^13
What is it about hazing practices that make them so precious to these
societies? What could make the groups want to evade, undermine, or
contest any effort to ban the degrading and perilous features of their
initiation rites? Some have argued that the groups themselves are
composed of psychological or social miscreants whose twisted needs
demand that others be harmed and humiliated. But the evidence does
not support such a view. Studies done on the personality traits of fra-
ternity members, for instance, show them to be, if anything, slightly
healthier than other college students in their psychological adjustment.
Similarly, fraternities are known for their willingness to engage in be-
neficial community projects for the general social good. What they are
not willing to do, however, is substitute these projects for their initiation
ceremonies. One survey at the University of Washington found that,
of the fraternity chapters examined, most had a type of Help Week
tradition but that this community service was in addition to Hell Week.
In only one case was such service directly related to initiation proced-
ures.^14
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, then, points to the ceremony as the culprit. There must
be something about its rigors that is vital to the group. There must be
some function to its harshness that the group will fight relentlessly to
maintain. What?
My own view is that the answer appeared in 1959 in the results of a
study little known outside of social psychology. A pair of young re-
searchers, Elliot Aronson and Judson Mills, decided to test their obser-
vation that “persons who go through a great deal of trouble or pain to
attain something tend to value it more highly than persons who attain
the same thing with a minimum of effort.” The real stroke of inspiration
came in their choice of the initiation ceremony as the best place to ex-
amine this possibility. They found that college women who had to en-
dure a severely embarrassing initiation ceremony in order to gain access
to a sex discussion group convinced themselves that their new group
and its discussions were extremely valuable, even though Aronson and
Mills had previously rehearsed the other group members to be as
“worthless and uninteresting” as possible. Different coeds, who went
through a much milder initiation ceremony or went through no initiation
at all, were decidedly less positive about the “worthless” new group
they had joined. Additional research showed the same results when
68 / Influence