Factions (Divergent)

In the Divergent trilogy and film, factions are societal divisions that classify citizens based on their aptitudes and values. The factions are Dauntless (the brave), Amity (the peaceful), Erudite (the intelligent), Abnegation (the selfless), and Candor (the honest). On an appointed day of every year, all sixteen-year-olds must select the faction to which they will devote for the rest of their lives after taking a placement test. The placement test shows you which faction you should be in. You can choose to devote yourself to your faction chosen by the placement test, or you could choose which faction you want to be in, regardless of your placement test results.

In an interview Roth describes the factions to have expanded from her initial conception when doing worldbuilding. She added Candor to fill "a gap in the reasoning behind the world that needed to be filled."

As revealed in Allegiant, the establishment of the faction system was directly caused by an event known as the Purity War. Years before the events of the series started, people thought that human errors were caused by what they thought were damages in their genes and tried to "correct" them. What they produced were instead violence that erupted from these "corrected" people, who were termed the "genetically damaged" (GD). Due to the discrimination they faced from the "genetically pure" (GP), the GD and GP fought the Purity War, which resulted in half of the US population dying. To counteract this, the U.S. government decided to set up several experimental bottle cities run by an organization known as the Bureau of Genetic Welfare. The goal of this project was to produce more GP population, known inside the bottle cities as "Divergents" from the GD subjects; once they were deemed enough, the cities were to be opened for the GP to repopulate the land.

All of the experimental cities were set up in the Midwest, as the cities needed to be located as far away from each other while simultaneously have easy access; the East Coast cities were deemed too close, while the terrain of the West Coast made it hard to navigate. Though Chicago was the most notable of the experimental cities by virtue as the central setting of the series, there were several cities mentioned to be experimented beforehand, including Indianapolis and Milwaukee, both of which were considered "control cities", as neither had the rigid faction system that ultimately caused their failures. Chicago was the first city where the faction system became a part of the social structure, which proved to be groundbreaking enough to be implemented in other experimental cities, including Detroit, Minneapolis, and St. Louis.

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