In this article the authors explore the social psychological processes underpinning sustainable commitment to a social or political cause. Drawing on recent developments in the collective action, identity formation, and social norm literatures, they advance a new model to understand sustainable commitment to action. The normative alignment model suggests that one solution to promoting ongoing commitment to collective action lies in crafting a social identity with a relevant pattern of norms for emotion, efficacy, and action. Rather than viewing group emotion, collective efficacy, and action as group products, the authors conceptualize norms about these as contributing to a dynamic system of meaning, which can shape ongoing commitment to a cause. By exploring emotion, efficacy, and action as group norms, it allows scholars to reenergize the theoretical connections between collective identification and subjective meaning but also allows for a fresh perspective on complex questions of causality.

Social psychology has much to say about conditions under which people will take action to overcome their own, or another group's, disadvantage. Starting with Le Bon's (1895/1947) analysis of crowd behavior, social psychologists have explored the psychological motivators and processes underpinning collective action for over a century (for reviews see Haslam, 2001; Klandermans, 1997). This paper focuses on two recent developments in that tradition that emphasize a central role of social identity. Specifically, van Zomeren, Postmes, and Spears (2008) have recently conducted an integrative meta-analysis of collective action research, yielding what van Zomeren et al. (2008) call the social identity model of collective action (SIMCA). Thomas, McGarty, and Mavor (2009a) proposed an alternative complementary role for social identity in the encapsulation model of social identity in collective action (EMSICA). This paper provides direct empirical tests of SIMCA and EMSICA with some new twists. Both models afford a central role to the function of social identities in promoting collective action.

This article explores the synergies between recent developments in the social identity of helping, and advantaged groups' prosocial emotion. The authors review the literature on the potential of guilt, sympathy, and outrage to transform advantaged groups' apathy into positive action. They place this research into a novel framework by exploring the ways these emotions shape group processes to produce action strategies that emphasize either social cohesion or social change. These prosocial emotions have a critical but underrecognized role in creating contexts of in-group inclusion or exclusion, shaping normative content and meaning, and informing group interests. Furthermore, these distinctions provide a useful way of differentiating commonly discussed emotions. The authors conclude that the most "effective" emotion will depend on the context of the inequality but that outrage seems particularly likely to productively shape group processes and social change outcomes.

Research has shown limited support for the notion that perceived effectiveness of collective action is a predictor of intentions to engage in collective action. One reason may be that effectiveness has been in terms of whether the action will influence key decision makers. We argue that the effectiveness of collective action might be judged by other criteria, such as whether it influences third parties, builds an oppositional movement, and expresses values. Two hundred and thirty one attendees at a rally rated the effectiveness of the rally and their intentions to engage in future collective action. For those participants who were not members of an organization, intentions were linked to the perceived effectiveness of the rally in expressing values and influencing the public. For those who were members of an organization, intentions were linked only to the effectiveness of the rally in building an oppositional movement.It is well documented that people's concerns about social and economic issues do not necessarily translate into collective action (Klandermans, 2002;Olson, 1968). For example, a 1983 Gallup poll (cited in Fox & Schofield, 1989 revealed that approximately 40% of people in the U.S. believed that it was likely that there would be nuclear war by 1998, and 70% believed that they would not survive a nuclear war. Despite this, surveys in the 1980s showed that only a very small minority of people engaged in collective

This paper challenges a finding reported by several researchers, that fundamentalism could be associated with a reduction in racial prejudice after controlling for authoritarianism (RWA). We argue that the presence of fundamentalism in the construct definition of the conventionalism cluster of RWA leads to higher associations between fundamentalism and conventionalism than with other aspects of RWA. This creates a statistical artefact that distorts the results of multiple regression analyses that include both fundamentalism and RWA as independent variables. To test this hypothesis, 299 participants completed measures of prejudice as well as fundamentalism and the three RWA clusters (conventionalism, authoritarian aggression, and submission). In regression analyses using fundamentalism and the combined RWA scale we replicate previous findings that when RWA is controlled, higher fundamentalism leads to lower prejudice. After removing the overlapping method variance in the scales, this pattern is eliminated and the commonly observed positive relationship between fundamentalism and prejudice is found. We describe the statistical artefact, its antecedents, and its theoretical implications, and outline how investigations in this important area should proceed.