Temporal Dynamics of Partisan Identity Fusion and Prosociality 
during the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election

Abstract

We investigated the dynamics of identity fusion and prosocial behavior within political groups in the four weeks preceding and following the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election. The primary questions were whether a negative event (losing) would lead to a more pronounced increase in identity fusion, and whether identity fusion would predict prosocial giving. We found that while fusion gradually increased in the run-up to the election, there was no significant increase after the event for supporters of either party. We also found that identity fusion robustly predicted prosocial ingroup giving, especially before the election, and even when accounting for self-reported identification and previous political commitment behaviors. Implications for theories of identity fusion are discussed.

Deep Alignment with Country Shrinks the Moral Gap Between Conservatives and Liberals

“…In support of this possibility, a study by Segal, Jong, and Halberstadt () found that strongly fused individuals’ prosociality was linked to their greater perceptions of harm in an agentless event (i.e., an earthquake) to which fused individuals nevertheless ascribed an agent. Indeed, identity fusion has consistently been linked to heightened feelings of both progroup agency (Swann et al, ) and prosociality (e.g., Misch, Fergusson, & Dunham, ). Thus, from a dyadic morality perspective, fused individuals’ moral sensibility may be undergirded by heightened feelings of moral responsibility and blame in response to the perceived suffering of group members.…”

Recent advances, misconceptions, untested assumptions, and future research agenda for identity fusion theory

“…All of the studies conducted since 2015 confirm that fusion motivates individuals to engage in several kinds of actions to protect or defend the entity with which they are fused, in addition to the traditional outcome measure of willingness to fight and die for the group. What they do seems to be determined by the kind of entity they are fused with as well as by some situational factors (e.g., Fredman et al, 2017; Misch, Ferguson, & Durnham, 2018; Newson, Buhrmester, & Whitehouse, 2016; Vázquez et al, 2017). For instance, people who strongly fuse with an outgroup that is victim of unjust treatment, like the Palestinians or the Kurds, are more willing to participate in extreme forms of protest on behalf of the group (Kunst et al, 2018); whereas people who fuse with an activity related to a brand are more willing to spread negative world‐of‐mouth, to boycott the brand, and to avoid repurchasing the brand after a market disruption or a brand transgression (Hawkins, 2019).…”

Turkers of the World Unite: Multilevel In-Group Bias Among Crowdworkers on Amazon Mechanical Turk

“…The premise of our experimental design is to use the Dictator Game (DG) to compare how willing crowdworkers on MTurk are to cooperate with each other, with crowdworkers from a different platform, or with random strangers. We elected to use a DG because it reflects consequential real-world behavior (i.e., giving money), and while it is frequently conceptualized as a measure of generosity, in intergroup contexts it directly relates to social identification (Misch, Fergusson, & Dunham, 2018;Peysakhovich & Rand, 2017) and so can serve as a behavioral indicator of group alignment. To determine a realistic floor in giving, we also include an additional condition in which "donated" money is destroyed, that is, lost to all parties including the donating participant.…”