Hazing -the abuse of new or prospective group members -is a widespread and puzzling feature of human social behavior, occurring in divergent cultures and across levels of technological complexity. Some past research has examined the effect of hazing on hazees, but no experimental work has been performed to examine the motivational causes of hazing. This paper has two primary objectives. First, it synthesizes a century of theory on severe initiations and extracts three primary explanatory themes. Second, it examines the dynamics of enduring human coalitions to generate an evolutionary theory of hazing. Two laboratory experiments suggest that one potential function of hazing is to reduce newcomers' ability to free ride around group entry. These results are discussed in light of two common but largely untested explanations of hazing.

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The purpose of this paper is to establish a foundation for studying and managing new employee hazing in workgroups. Available empirical evidence indicates 25–75% of American employees encounter workplace hazing, but very little empirical research exists on this phenomenon. Workers are changing jobs more frequently than ever, which increases the cumulative impact and importance of new employee experiences, including hazing, a complex group-based phenomenon. Because hazing is a relatively universal social practice without a strongly established literature in the organizational sciences, we draw from multiple disciplines in reviewing and modeling the practice. The current research offers three major contributions: (a) a relatively exhaustive review of relevant empirical and theoretical work on hazing, (b) an initial, testable model for understanding workplace hazing as a multi-level phenomenon, including individual and group-level antecedents and outcomes, and (c) an outline of the need and support for considering both the dysfunctional and functional consequences of hazing, given the variety of forms it takes and reactions it evokes. Finally, we present actionable guidance for researchers seeking to study workplace hazing and discuss the organizational implications of our work for practitioners.

Enduring human coalitions face the adaptive problem of integrating new members. Although newcomers can provide benefits (e.g., additional labor), newcomers can also create costs (e.g., by free riding). Due to the unique adaptive problems they pose, we hypothesize that the mind contains an evolved concept of newcomer. We test the design of this concept experimentally and show that the activation of the newcomer concept elicits a variety of anti-free rider responses (e.g., a decrease in trust) with adaptively-targeted exceptions (e.g., a minimal increase in exclusion sentiment). These results support the hypothesis that the mind contains specialized concepts for understanding, creating, and sustaining intergenerational coalitions.

People regularly free ride on collective benefits, consuming them without contributing to their creation. In response, free riders are often moralized, becoming targets of negative moral judgments, anger, ostracism, or punishment. Moralization can change free riders' behavior (e.g., encouraging them to contribute or discouraging them from taking future benefits) or it can motivate others, including moralizers, to avoid or exclude free riders; these effects of moralization are critical to sustaining human cooperation. Based on theories of error management and fundamental social domains from evolutionary psychology, we propose that the decision to moralize is a cue-driven process. One cue investigated in past work is observing a person illicitly consume collective benefits. Here, we test whether the mind uses a 2nd cue: merely opting out of contributing. Use of this cue creates a phenomenon of preventive moralization: moralization of people who have not yet exploited collective benefits but who might-or might not-in the future. We tested for preventive moralization across 9 studies using implicit and explicit measures of moralization, a behavioral measure of costly punishment, mediation analyses of the underlying processes, and a nationally representative sample of almost 1,000 U.S. adults. Results revealed that merely opting out of contributing to the creation of exploitable collective benefits-despite not actually exploiting collective benefits-elicited moralization. Results further showed that preventive moralization is not due to the moralization of selfishness or deviance but instead follows from the uncertainty inherent in moralization decisions. These results imply that even people who will never exploit collective benefits can nonetheless be targets of moralization. We discuss implications for social and political dynamics.