Cameron dead pig claims put spotlight on student rituals

A billionaire Conservative Party donor who feels aggrieved at having been overlooked for a cabinet post enlists the help of a journalist to write a biography of the man who spurned him: British prime minister David Cameron.

An unnamed MP tells the authors of having once heard of an Oxford society initiation ritual involving Cameron and a dead pig. The authors publish, then admit they have no evidence and don't really know if the story is true. Cameron's entourage flatly deny it. By the time they do so, though, the Daily Mail has serialised the book and social media has gleefully spun some A-grade hashtags.

About the only certain thing about the story was that a lot of people wanted to believe it. Why? Partly, no doubt, because it exceeded wishful expectations: members of the posh Oxford dining group in question, the Piers Gaveston Society, were not only pretentious and decadent, it suggested, but deviant and weird too.

This was the milieu of the Bullingdon Club, after all; an Oxford society whose new members, it was claimed two years ago, had to burn a £50 note in front of a beggar as their initiation rite.

Humiliating initiation ceremonies are not the preserve of the English toff. US university fraternities, all-male clubs that foster solidarity and community service while plugging their members into elite networks, also have a long history of violence against their own members. Continental college culture has its own initiation or hazing rituals.

Irish campuses don’t quite have an equivalent of the Bullingdon Club, a place where ruddy-faced members of the ruling caste can put on an ill-fitting tux and glory in their sense of entitlement.

Perhaps a less stratified class system has something to do with it, or the more prominent role of the school crest – specifically, that of rugby-playing fee-paying school – as a badge of class separation.

Some try nonetheless. Trinity College Dublin has the Knights of the Campanile, an obscure all-male elite sporting society with mysterious entry procedures and a reputation for alcohol-fuelled high-jinks (it's not secret, though; it has a website, for starters). In 2012, a US-style fraternity named Theta Omicron was established at Trinity.

Yet, from the Knights of St Columbanus to the Freemasons, Ireland has a rich tradition of secret – or at least very private – societies with strange codified rituals. Candidates for membership of the masons are admitted in a ceremony that involves kneeling blindfolded on a blue pillow and taking an oath surrounded by men in regalia, half of them brandishing swords. Across Ireland, sports clubs, student societies and criminal gangs all have their own initiation rites.

The psychology behind college high-jinks has inspired a genre of academic inquiry. In a 1965 experiment by a pair of psychologists from Stanford University and the US army's leadership research unit – described recently by the science writer Simon Oxenham – it was found that students who were put through sexually explicit initiation ceremonies were far more likely to like the other group members afterwards.

The researchers put the effect down to cognitive dissonance: in an attempt to justify their participation to themselves, the humiliated students declared their new-found fondness for the other group members and shut out the opposite, obvious conclusion – that their new friends were awful people.