Abstract
As Identity Fusion Theory is being adopted more widely in social psychology, it is increasingly being applied to the study of commitment not just to large groups, but also to individuals, animals, brands, places, and abstract ideas. This expansion is often poorly theorised and relies on multiple unacknowledged redefinitions of IFT’s main concepts and claims. This chapter demonstrates that, in the process, the contrast between fusion and social identification has been abandoned in much of the research on the topic, as the meaning of ‘identity fusion’ becomes increasingly diluted. The general state of confusion in the literature has led to the flattening of the meaning of ‘identity fusion’ to something analogous to ‘a sense of belonging’, ‘strong commitment’, or merely a particularly strong social identity. Important aspects of the theory have been forgotten by later researchers, as they come to use the concept of fusion in increasingly shallow and inconsistent ways. We argue that the seeds of this confusion were present in IFT from its inception.
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Notes
- 1.
See also Kamil and Susianto (2021)—the authors measured fusion with Komodo dragons and its effect on support for conservation efforts, although they excluded the measure of fusion from the final analysis because it was not correlated with anything else.
- 2.
Indeed, adapting the verbal measure of fusion to this context would mean giving participants statements like “I am Cecil” and “Cecil is me” to agree or disagree with.
- 3.
“[A]lignment with categorical groups always involves an element of identification, but it could also involve extended fusion if those categorical groups are thought to share group essence on the basis of either biology or self-defining experiences.” (Reese & Whitehouse, 2021)
- 4.
From Swann et al. (2009): “We reasoned that verbal measures of identification would be nonoptimal because none of these measures focus specifically on perceived oneness with the group. Instead, they focus on qualities such as satisfaction, solidarity, centrality, individual self-stereotyping, and ingroup homogeneity (Leach et al., 2008). For example, one of the most widely used measures of identification (Mael & Ashforth, 1992) measures endorsement of items such as “If a story in the media criticized my group, I would feel embarrassed” and “I am very interested in what citizens of other countries think about my group.” To obtain high scores on such scales, one must believe that one shares features or outcomes with the group, but it is not necessary to have any deep feeling of oneness with, or connection to, the group.”
- 5.
As a positive counterexample of this trend, see e.g. Bortolini et al. (2018), who used three different measures of identification and found that fusion predicted more variance in the outcome variable than any of them.
- 6.
See for example Gómez et al. (2020): “fused individuals display high levels of personal agency that serves the group’s agenda”.
- 7.
Wlodarczyk et al. (2021) also describe how feelings of transcendence can “enable one to see oneself as part of something greater. Moreover, they weaken differences between the self and the social world, inducing fusion of personal identity with the social world.” Here we see the tendency in the identity fusion literature to use ‘the self’ interchangeably with ‘the personal self’ (which in SIT is only one part of the self); the thing it is fused with is described here as ‘the social world’, not ‘the group’ or ‘the social self’.
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Siromahov, M., Hata, A. (2023). Piling Con(fusion): Identity Fusion Theory Today. In: Rethinking Identity Fusion. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46983-1_5
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