Abstract
This chapter critiques the ways in which Identity Fusion Theory’s hard cognitivist approach distorts the meaning of established concepts in the Social Identity tradition. IFT appears to treat the personal and social identities or ‘selves’ not as two modes of social being but as mental entities that produce extreme behaviours through their mechanical interactions. This allows it to claim that an individual can form ‘personal relationships’ with in-group strangers on a large scale by ‘projecting’ relational ties onto them, in a process that is poorly theorised and lacking in empirical support.
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Notes
- 1.
These two references look like they might provide more clarity on the ‘personal and social selves’ described by IFT, but upon closer inspection they do not. While William James (1890) did discuss people having ‘social selves’, he clearly meant it in the sense of the different social roles that a person might have (he gives the example of the roles of a soldier, a priest, and so on). Central to his conceptualisation was the way a person was being perceived by others, in that a person has as many selves as there are people who know him or her. This is substantially different from the ‘social self’ being a singular cognitive representation of a group-membership, as IFT is assuming. Tajfel and Turner’s (1979) publication also does not provide us with more clarity, as it describes a continuum of individual versus collective behaviour, not different images of the self—the idea of the continuum between individual and collective identity would appear later, with Turner’s (1982) Self-Categorisation Theory.
- 2.
We again come across the peculiar use of the word ‘personal’ implying a distinction between personal and social without stating so directly. When people act, we say that they have agency, full stop. When the authors qualify it as ‘personal agency’ specifically, they could be suggesting that there is an alternative kind of agency that non-fused people have—perhaps a social or collective agency? We saw a similar turn of phrase (“personally committed”) in Whitehouse et al. (2014) in Chap. 2.
- 3.
See e.g. Turner and Onorato (1999), p.324: “Depersonalisation is a dynamic process. It’s the shifting of self-definition away from individual differences and towards social similarities. Social identity also produces socially unitary collective behaviour; it produces a mutual orientation of attraction, cooperation and influence as members define and react to each other in terms of their common social category membership rather than as differing individuals.” Also Reicher et al. (1995, p.177): “Turner … refers to this shift from relating to others on an individual level to relating on a higher level of inclusiveness as a process of depersonalization.”
- 4.
Here we see another version of the ‘personal vs. social’ dichotomy discussed in Chap. 2. In this instance, the authors seem to be implying that each ‘self’ can form attachments to specific targets: attachment to the group as an abstraction comes from the ‘social self’, and caring about individual group-members—from the ‘personal self’. This distinction does not seem to feature anywhere in the Social Identity approach and seems to come instead from IFT’s insistence on splitting every psychological phenomenon into two along the lines of the ‘personal/social’ dichotomy. Also, note that the distinction between these two forms of caring is never used to distinguish between fused and non-fused people in practice.
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Siromahov, M., Hata, A. (2023). The Limitations of Extreme Cognitivism. In: Rethinking Identity Fusion. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46983-1_3
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