Winning at any cost: Identity fusion, group essence, and maximizing ingroup advantage

Abstract

From verbal abuse to physical intimidation of opponents, some ingroup members seek to maximize their group's competitive edge regardless of personal repercussions. What motivates such extreme commitment? Based on identity fusion theory, we argue that strongly fused persons seek ingroup victory at any cost when they believe that a competition's outcome affects the group's essence. Two studies, conducted across four countries and in two sports contexts, revealed that fused persons who believed one's national sport constituted part of the nation's essence were especially likely to maximize their ingroup's advantage over the outgroup, even when doing so came at a personal cost and harmed the outgroup. Together, our findings shed new light on the motives of fused persons in intergroup conflict.

Dying for the group: Towards a general theory of extreme self-sacrifice

“…With respect to the consequences of fusion, Whitehouse's rather narrow focus on violence, terrorism, and extreme behavior overlooks the fact that identity fusion may manifest itself in many other ways. For example, fusion has been linked to charitable giving to members of the in-group (Buhrmester et al 2018b;Misch et al 2018;Swann et al 2010b), donations of time and money to the community following a catastrophic earthquake (Segal et al 2018), adaptive coping in couples (Walsh & Neff 2018), endorsement of self-sacrifice in intergroup versions of the trolley dilemma (Gómez et al 2011a;Swann et al 2010a;2014b), expected life satisfaction following an election defeat or victory (Buhrmester et al 2012), plans to remain in the group (Gómez et al 2011b), curtailing medical aid to an out-group (Fredman et al 2017), endorsement of granting favors to one's twin (Vázquez et al 2017), undergoing sex reassignment surgery (Swann et al 2015), and endorsement of having the group fight for the self (Heger & Gaertner 2018b). One goal for a general theory of fusion would be to develop a common explanatory framework that could accommodate all of the diverse manifestations of identity fusion.…”

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

“…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). In contexts where the group's essence is threatened, strongly fused persons are especially likely to maximize the ingroup's advantage over the outgroup even at the expense of personal costs (Buhrmester, Newson, Vázquez, Hattori, & Whitehouse, 2018). Other studies show that fusion with a group may engender lifelong loyalty to it (Newson et al, 2016), and that fusion with religion is positively related to the desire of retaliation after a threat to the religious group (Fredman et al, 2017).…”

“…Research has also tried to expand the factors that moderate or mediate the effects of fusion. With respect to the moderators, it has been discovered that strongly fused individuals are particularly willing to sacrifice for the group when the essence of the group is threatened (Buhrmester, Newson, et al, 2018). Fused individuals are also more willing to go to the extremes for the group when they feel morally compelled to do so than when they do not experience any feelings of moral obligation (Kunst et al, 2018).…”

“…Research on the mechanisms related to fusion has also examined the processes that amplify the effect of shared experiences on fusion. Several studies point out that shared experiences are especially effective to increase identity fusion when they are attributed to the will of a supernatural agent (Segal et al, 2018) and when they are intense enough to make individuals reflect about their meaning and believe that they have been personally shaped by them (Buhrmester, Newson, et al, 2018; Newson et al, 2016).…”

Exploring the pathways between transformative group experiences and identity fusion.

“…Our justification for H2 is that there is a a broad array of empirical results and theoretical discussion that suggests a stronger relationship between the perception of sharing a 'group essence' and identity fusion than with group identification (Buhrmester et al, 2018;Swann et al, 2012;Whitehouse, 2018;Whitehouse et al, 2017;. The sense of possessing such a shared essence is theorized, in part, to emerge from an individual seeing relevant group events as 1) selftransformative and 2) believing their perception to be shared by other group members.…”