Identity Fusion

Identity Fusion is a concept in social psychology that describes a unique phenomenon where an individual’s personal identity becomes deeply intertwined with their social identity, creating a strong sense of belonging to a group. This fusion can lead individuals to exhibit extreme behaviors comparable to familial loyalty, such as making personal sacrifices for the group's sake, including risking their safety or engaging in costly actions. Identity Fusion goes beyond typical group identification; it represents a blurred line between personal and social selves, often resulting in enhanced emotional connections to group members.

Those who experience identity fusion may feel a profound allegiance not only to the group as a whole but also to its individual members. This phenomenon has been studied in various contexts, from sports fandom to military service, and can explain why some individuals display passionate commitment or even extreme actions in support of their group. Researchers propose that certain group dynamics, such as shared experiences and cultural ties, may foster identity fusion, making it a vital area of study for understanding group behavior and intergroup relations.

Published in: 2021

By:

Subject Terms

Identity Fusion

Abstract

Identity fusion is a phenomenon studied in social psychology, in which an individual's personal self has become fused with their social self. Individuals with fused identities behave differently with respect to a group with which they identify in ways more commonly associated with how individuals feel about their immediate family, including putting one's own self at risk for the sake of the group, or endorsing extreme behaviors that would not be tolerated in out-groups. Identity fusion has proven a strong predictor for these behaviors. The group to which the individual feels loyal may be anything from a sports team to a military unit to a political activist group.

Overview

Every individual belongs to a group of some kind—groups ranging from their family to their country, and including groups such as school classes, coworkers, political parties, military units, activist groups, hobbyist associations, social organizations like MENSA or the Shriners, fans of sports teams, and players in a bowling league. Not all group memberships impact an individual in the same way, and usually some group members feel more strongly about their group than other members. Everyone is aware of a certain spectrum of intensity in sports fandom; however, some fans are only tenuously attached to a team and may have seen some recent games, whereas others attend every game they can in person and follow every move the franchise makes in the off-season.

Social psychologists consider group dynamics in sophisticated ways. Their work addresses issues like why some employees are willing to devote so much effort to their job, out of proportion to their wages; why some sports fans become so passionately invested that arguments with fans of rival teams can lead to violence; why some soldiers will sacrifice themselves to save their unit; and so on. Identity fusion is a concept in social psychology that describes the ways in which an individual can feel an especially strong sense of belonging to a group—a sense strong enough that it is frequently referred to as "oneness."

Identity fusion is a distinct phenomenon from group identification, in ways explained by the concepts of the personal self and the social self. Identity fusion can be used to explain more extreme cases of behavior, such as when a member of a group is willing to engage in costly behaviors such as making large donations, or risk social stigma from outgroups or society as a whole, or even to die for it. This is an area of human behavior that scientists since Darwin have attempted to explain, since acting against one's own interests—especially for the sake of entities other than one's own family—goes against much of what is understand about the instincts of self-preservation that drive the species.

Sacrificing one's interest for genetic relatives is more easily understood; thus, in discussions of identity fusion, the group in question is usually assumed to be a group other than the individual's immediate family. Indeed one of the characteristic features of identity fusion is that the individual's feelings about the group, and the strength of those feelings, is best compared to the feelings experienced in tightly knit families.

The personal self is characterized by those things that distinguish an individual from others: distinct individual characteristics, from appearance and other aspects of the body to their skill set, personality traits, and life experiences. The social self is the individual's characteristics that bear on group membership; these include unchangeable traits like nationality and other geographically bound memberships (New Yorker, Southerner, Hoosier), race and ethnicity, but also voluntary associations like university enrollment, sports team fandom, political party, or activist group member.

Group identification or collective identity is simply the feeling of belonging to a group. The personal self and the social self remain clearly delineated, which is not to say that group identification is not still a very powerful thing. Numerous studies have shown that the majority of Americans consistently vote for the same party in every election, but few of these Americans could be said to have a fused identity. A fused identity means that the lines between the personal self and social self have become blurred; the individual's sense of belonging to the group exceeds that conferred by normal social ties, becoming as strong as or stronger than familial ties.

Further Insights

The theoretical work on identity fusion initially built on and responded to social identity theory, which was formulated in the 1970s and popular throughout the 1980s and 1990s as a means of explaining intergroup behavior. Social identity theory focuses on the behavioral effects of members' ability to move from one group to another and of group status. It describes an individual's social behavior as existing on a continuum from interpersonal behavior to intergroup behavior, and so as the personal self waxes, the social self wanes, and vice versa. Identity fusion differs from social identity theory notably in this area, depicting a very different relationship between the personal self and social self, in which there is no tug of war between them, but rather a porousness that is not found in people with non-fused identities. The individual's self-image is more influenced by the social self, rather than becoming less important as the social self becomes more focal.

One of the key concepts to both social identity and identity fusion theory is in-group favoritism, also known as in-group bias or intergroup bias. In this phenomenon, individuals systematically favor members of their in-group over out-group members or to an extent that is disproportionate to the member's merits. However, each theory constructs this bias differently. In social identity theory, it is allegiance to the group itself that contributes to the bias. In identity fusion, individuals with fused identities feel a sense of allegiance both to their in-group and to each member of it. The difference is subtle but important, and bears on the ways identity fusion was developed to explain behaviors for which social identity theory was insufficiently predictive.

Identity fusion is based on four principles: agentic personal self, identity synergy, relational ties, and irrevocability. Agentic personal self refers to the way that the personal self remains strong and in control even when the social self is activated by circumstance, in contrast with the tug-of-war described by social identity theory. Identity synergy is the phenomenon of the two selves being activated together in order to strengthen the individual's motivation in pro-group behaviors. Relational ties is the aforementioned phenomenon of fused identity individuals feeling an allegiance to individual group members rather than primarily to the collective. Irrevocability refers to the stability of a fused identity once the individual is truly fused, because they have entered a state in which their emotional responses related to the group are especially heightened.

All of these principles contribute to one of the phenomena most important to social psychologists who study identity fusion: the willingness of the individual to engage in extreme behavior for the sake of a group or its members, including dying for it.

Identity fusion has also been proposed as a one way to describe the choice of transgender individuals who elect to undergo sex reassignment or gender-affirming surgery, in which case the social self is that self that identifies with the "group" consisting of their identified gender. This is controversial—most social psychological work on groups deals with groups smaller and more narrowly delineated than the roughly 50 percent of the population that either gender represents—but has been an area of discussion in studies about the non-economic reasons that some transgender individuals elect to undergo surgery and others do not.

Issues

Where identity fusion is most useful as a theoretical framework, as compared with social identity theory, is in its predictive ability. Studies have shown that identity fusion is a strong predictor for an individual's willingness to engage in costly behaviors ranging from significant donations to illegal activity, as well as for the individual providing emotional support to fellow group members. Simply approaching the relationship between individual and group from the social identity framework and relying on in-group favoritism to explain these behaviors is not adequately predictive. Without considering the fused identity, nothing differentiates committed group members from those who display these particular behaviors. Dozens of studies have demonstrated the usefulness of identity fusion as a predictor.

Identity fusion research is most frequently discussed in the context of its work explaining the behavior of individuals who are members of, or sympathetic to, extremist groups from terrorist groups like ISIS to violent anti-abortion activists. Two kinds of pro-group behaviors have been examined: engaging in actions that are personally costly and endorsing extreme actions by the group. Costly behaviors are those that present some risk or exact some other serious cost to the individual, such as social stigmas, criminal activities, or suicide-bombing.

The study of identity fusion and criminal activity presents ethical issues, especially in cases regarding extremist groups. The observing researcher would have to allow illegal actions to be carried out without intervening to glean reliable research data, a generally unacceptable solution.

Strongly fused individuals have been found to be more likely to be whistleblowers, which is interesting in light of their greater allegiance to group members. Researchers propose that such whistleblowers are acting in the interest of the integrity of the group. For example, a student reporting the cheating of classmates, might be motivated by a strong sense of identification with their school.

Fusion theory suggests that the culture of the group is key to enabling or encouraging fusion, in specific ways. A group may be well-defined without its members being likely to have fused identities. For instance, there are many Irish Americans, many of whom have had ties to Irish American communities for generations; there are Irish American restaurants, a distinct Irish American cuisine, and distinct Irish American cultural practices. Neither corned beef nor Saint Patrick's Day are prominent features of Irish culture in Ireland itself, but have developed specific relevance to the Irish American community, enough to signify "Irishness" to out-groups. Despite this, fused identities are not characteristic of the Irish American community. On the other hand, an Irish American bar in the Boston area, devoted to Red Sox fandom, could certainly be a group that includes members with fused identities.

The difference is that this group has shared memories that reinforce group ties—memories of notable Red Sox wins and losses, for instance—and is small enough that many members have developed strong ties to one another, have supported one another during emotional periods related to their fandom, and may feel that they are better understood by their fellow bar patrons—at least in this important area of their lives—than by their coworkers or even their family. Members may be powerfully motivated to go out of their way to help fellow members in times of need, or to sacrificing time with their own families in order to spend time with the group watching games.

The hypothetical bar patrons do not necessarily identify more strongly with the idea of being a Red Sox bar patron than Irish Americans identify with being Irish American; rather the way they identify with the group is different. The relationship between their personal and social self is different, in large part because of the experiences they have had while in the group and that they associate with group membership.

What is key here is the way that an individual feeling personally invested in and shaped by the events and common memory of their group—such as those highs and lows of following the storied career of the Red Sox—encourages identity fusion more than simply an investment of time in the group. While people belong to many groups over the course of their lives, identity fusion is more likely to lead to a feeling of lifelong oneness and loyalty.

To retain sports fandom as our example, numerous sports teams attract fans primarily when they do well; however, certain teams—the Red Sox, Chicago Cubs, and Green Bay Packers, for example—have a long history of staunch fan support that is independent of the team's performance. Fans of these teams often have fused identities, and passionately invest in their team and the culture of fandom surrounding it, feeling newly dismayed at every loss even though they have come to expect it. They may travel long distances to see games, even traveling to Florida or Arizona in the off-season to watch spring training games that have no impact on the team's standing; they may have tattoos or expensive memorabilia; they forgo other leisure activities in order to devote that time to the team and the fandom.

While clearly this behavior is worlds away from that of violent extremists, identity fusion explains the phenomenon of unconditional loyalty to the group in both cases: The social self and the personal self have become permeable and there are fewer differences between the two. Some psychologists have suggested that certain kinds of groups are more likely to catalyze identity fusion than others. Fused identities associated with regional or national cultures, for instance, are more common in "cultures of honor" such as exist in Mediterranean Europe and the Southern United States, where the honor of in-group members is strongly linked to the individual's self-conception.

Some groups encourage the development of ties among group members more than others, both implicitly and explicitly through group dialogue and group culture. This is certainly true for college fraternities and sororities, for example, with their use of familial labels to describe group members. Close ties are also notable among militaries and military schools as well as other tightly knit cultural units such as Japanese businesses.

Terms & Concepts

Affect: In psychology, the experience of an emotion, which may be described as an affective state that can vary in motivational intensity, arousal, and valence (consequences or associated circumstances).

In-group: A group of people with which a given individual identifies as a member; often characterized by a shared interest or trait.

Out-group: A group of people with which a given individual does not identify.

Personal Self: The characteristics that distinguish a person from other people, such as appearance, ability, and personality.

Social Psychology: The study of human behavior and thinking and of the influence on such by interactions with or the awareness of others.

Social Self: The characteristics of a person that pertain to group memberships.

Bibliography

Fredman, L. A., Buhrmester, M. D., Gomez, A., Fraser, W. T., Talaifar, S., Brannon, S. M., & Swann, W. B. (2015). Identity fusion, extreme pro-group behavior, and the path to defusion. Social & Personality Psychology Compass, 9(9), 468–-480.

Jiménez, J., Gómez, Á., Buhrmester, M. D., Vázquez, A., Whitehouse, H., & Swann, W. B. (2016). The dynamic identity fusion index. Social Science Computer Review, 34(2), 215–228.

Jong, J., Whitehouse, H., Kavanagh, C., & Lane, J. (2015). Shared negative experiences lead to identity fusion via personal reflection. Plos ONE, 10(12), 1–12.

Newson, M., Buhrmester, M., & Whitehouse, H. (2016). Explaining lifelong loyalty: The role of identity fusion and self-shaping group events. Plos ONE, 11(8), 1–13.

Swann, J. B., Gómez, Á., Huici, C., Morales, J. F., & Hixon, J. G. (2010). Identity fusion and self-sacrifice: Arousal as a catalyst of pro-group fighting, dying, and helping behavior. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 99(5), 824–841. Retrieved November 1, 2017, from EBSCO Sociology Source Ultimate http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=54904736&site=ehost-live

Vázquez, A., Gómez, Á., Ordoñana, J. R., Swann, W. B., & Whitehouse, H. (2017). Sharing genes fosters identity fusion and altruism. Self & Identity, 16(6), 684–702.

Vázquez, A., Gómez, Á., & Swann, W. B. (2017). Do historic threats to the group diminish identity fusion and its correlates? Self & Identity, 16(4), 480–-503.

Identity Fusion

On this Page

Subject Terms

Identity Fusion

Abstract

Overview

Further Insights

Issues

Terms & Concepts

Bibliography

Suggested Reading