Collective oath is an act of group commitment, not factual testimony

Evidence

The difference in style is well reflected in how you testify at court. The country folk testify in groups in collective oath. Under proper Muslim law, you testify as an individual. The collective oath of the tribesmen is really an expression of commitment to the group, an expression of a willingness to bear responsibility with it. It is not a testimony to matters of factual accuracy, which is the purpose of the oath offered by the individual in an urban trial. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 2007

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Collective oath as group-bounded verification mirrors how trust works when monitoring is impossible: you trust the group’s solidarity, not its factual reliability.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: what does individual oath-testimony in the high tradition imply about a social order where the individual, not the group, is the trust-relevant unit?

Related

• Rural collective oaths express group commitment rather than factual accuracy (similarity 0.92)
• Town religion is rules-based while tribal collective oaths express group loyalty (similarity 0.85)