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Metodi Siromahov • Annie Hata
Rethinking Identity
Fusion
A Critical Examination
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CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Abstract The chapter provides a brief outline of Identity Fusion Theory
(IFT) and describes the aims and approach of the present critique.
Keywords Social identity • Self-categorisation • Identity fusion •
Cognitive psychology • Terrorism • Extremism
Identity Fusion Theory (IFT) was first proposed by Swann et al. (2009)
15 years ago as an attempt to explain extreme acts, such as terrorist attacks
or self-sacrifice, committed in the name of a group. It is a cognitive theory
of identity which, although based on and borrowing a conceptual vocabulary from earlier theories of social identity, has become established as an
elaborate theory and a vibrant research field in its own right. The hypothetical phenomenon of identity fusion has been studied using both quantitative and qualitative methods and has been used to interpret passionate
forms of collective identity in contexts as diverse as Libyan rebel groups,
Viking war bands, football fans, nationalism, brand loyalty, gaming subcultures, and wildlife conservation movements. It was also the subject of a
special 2018 issue of the journal Behavioural and Brain Sciences, where it
generated a lively critical discussion.
Emerging in the post-9/11 world of the late 2000s, the theory is perhaps best understood in the context of contemporary debates about the
hypothetical roots—cultural, ideological, personal, institutional, etc.—of
1
,
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2
M. SIROMAHOV AND A. HATA
acts of terrorism involving violence against civilians and self-sacrifice on
behalf of the perpetrators. The first publication outlining the theory
(Swann et al., 2009) even opens with an explicit reference to the 2001
World Trade Center attacks, the 2004 metro bombing in Madrid, and the
2005 bombings in London. Rather than blaming the perpetrators’ ideology, as was common at the time, identity fusion theorists turned to more
universal psychological processes to explain such extreme acts. Whitehouse,
one of the main researchers working on IFT since its inception, has explicitly pointed to his earlier anthropological work on collective rituals and
group cohesion as influencing his approach to the subject (Whitehouse,
2017). The theory views such extreme acts of violence as essentially pro-­
group acts in support of a tightly knit collective (such as a terrorist cell or
a combat unit) carried out by particularly devoted members, and explains
this extreme commitment as the product of psychological processes
involved in the formation and maintenance of a collective identity. People
who are willing to make extreme sacrifices in the name of a group are said
to do so because they relate to that group in a specific way—seeing other
group-members as an extension of themselves, like a close-knit family.
This state of “visceral sense of oneness” with a group is called identity fusion.
IFT starts with a long-established conceptual distinction between one’s
personal identity (reflecting one’s individual characteristics) and the social
or collective identity (reflecting one’s membership in a group, e.g., being
an American or a Democrat). The theory holds that, for most people who
belong to a group, the two identities are mutually exclusive—for example,
when our group-memberships are important to us, our individual characteristics fade into the background, so that a strong social identity often
comes at the expense of a weakened personal identity; such people are said
to have little sense of who they are beyond their group-membership, and
end up becoming conformist, obedient, and lacking in personal agency.
But, crucially, in a minority of individuals the two identities can become
‘fused’ in a way that enables both to be active at the same time:
… we propose that the personal self remains potent and influential among
fused persons. In fact, for fused persons, group membership is intensely
personal, for they feel that they care as much about the outcomes of the
group as their own outcomes. (Swann et al., 2009)
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INTRODUCTION
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In such a state of identity fusion, having a strong attachment to a group
does not diminish one’s sense of personhood or agency. Instead, strongly
‘fused’ people perceive the wellbeing of the group as indispensable for
their own wellbeing and view threats to the group as threats to their own
life. It is precisely the fusion and simultaneous salience of the two identities that is said to enable such individuals to go to extremes in defence of
the groups they belong to:
[this disposition to extreme sacrifice] would be motivated by a highly salient
personal and group identity between individuals, with a visceral feeling of
deep union between the personal self and the social self, so that the delimitation between both identities becomes indistinguishable (Henríquez
et al., 2020)
We can see examples of this deep enmeshment with others in close-knit
families, where a person can go beyond merely identifying with the group
category in the abstract, and can also form close and meaningful connections with group-members as individuals. Identity Fusion theorists go a
step further by claiming that such a dynamic can exist not only in small
family-like groups (like a football team or a terrorist cell), but also in large,
impersonal groups, where the ‘fused’ individual cannot possibly know
most of the other group-members personally—up to the level of whole
nationalities. When a person’s individual and social identities become
merged, they are said to ‘project familial ties’ onto the group, in effect
perceiving it as an extended family, with all the deep emotional attachments and feelings of protectiveness that one has for one’s own family:
… self-reported feelings of familial connection to other group members statistically mediated links between fusion and pro-group outcomes […]
Apparently, highly fused persons view their group members as fictive family
members, and these perceptions motivate them to take extreme actions on
the behalf of these individuals. (Swann & Buhrmester, 2015)
In this way, identity fusion is used to explain not only deep emotional
connections with one’s family or comrades but also large-scale social phenomena such as extremist nationalism or religious fanaticism (e.g., Besta
et al., 2014). This ‘extended fusion’ with nations and other large, impersonal collectives has been a major focus of IFT research since its inception,
and subsequent publications have extended IFT to study ‘identity fusion’
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M. SIROMAHOV AND A. HATA
with out-groups, famous individuals, animal species, and abstract entities,
such as brands and ideologies. IFT can make that jump from deep personal connections with known group-members to equally deep attachments to strangers or abstractions because its approach is essentially
cognitive—it assumes that the ‘fusion’ between the personal and collective
identities is a cognitive process in which two mental representations
become merged in the person’s mind; and, since any two cognitive representation can ostensibly undergo the same process, the range of things
that one can become ‘fused’ with is potentially limitless.
On this theoretical foundation a large body of empirical, predominantly
quantitative research has been accumulated. Fusion theorists have conducted studies to support the main theoretical claims of IFT, for example
demonstrating that identification and fusion with a group are two distinct
phenomena, and that fusion is a more reliable predictor of extreme pro-­
group behaviour than identification (Swann, Gómez, Huici et al., 2010;
Swann, Gómez, Dovidio et al., 2010). They have explored the causes of
identity fusion, demonstrating that people are more likely to become
‘fused’ with groups with which they share the same genes or culture
(Vázquez et al., 2017), or if they have gone through traumatic or otherwise dysphoric experiences together (Jong et al., 2015). Finally, they have
traced some of the consequences of identity fusion, such as long-lasting
attachments (Newson et al., 2016; Talaifar et al., 2021) and an increased
propensity towards political violence (Kunst et al., 2019). More recent
studies have extended the explanatory framework offered by IFT beyond
the study of group memberships: a particularly fruitful research area has
been identity fusion with individuals (such as political or religious leaders;
Kunst et al., 2019; Nikolic, 2021), animals (Buhrmester et al., 2018), or
even abstract concepts like brands (Lin & Sung, 2014; Hawkins, 2019;
Krishna & Kim, 2021).
We have attempted to produce a précis of IFT’s key claims and ideas,
which have been developed over the span of a decade and a half. However,
such a summary can only ever be partially successful. As we will argue in
this book, IFT’s use of language is often slippery: sometimes the theory
gives multiple non-overlapping definitions for the same concepts, making
it difficult to fix its claims in place; and other times it leaves important
concepts under-theorised, especially ones that are already common currency in everyday language but are used in IFT with a peculiar, counterintuitive meaning. Distilling its tenets requires us to cut out aspects of the
theory that sit uneasily alongside each other, and simultaneously elaborate
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1
INTRODUCTION
5
on ideas which were only hinted at by its authors but never stated explicitly, as will become clear in the next two chapters.
At its core, Identity Fusion Theory does point to an important real
phenomenon in group dynamics—the sense of deep enmeshment with
others that can occur in close-knit groups (such as army regiments, secret
societies, fraternities, close friendship circles, or religious cults), which is
indeed distinct from mere identification with, or membership in, a group.
When group membership involves frequent close and emotionally intense
interaction with others and a high degree of self-disclosure and mutual
trust, it can acquire a deep emotional significance for the group-members;
people sometimes do describe such groups as feeling “like a family”, with
the other group-members being like brothers or sisters to them—the
romanticist language of kinship reflects the emotions and solidarity felt
within such communities. By drawing attention to this quality of group
membership and distinguishing it from mere self-labelling as group-­
member, fusion theory makes an important conceptual distinction.
However, while IFT does point to this really existing phenomenon of
social life, we will argue that its explanation for it—the fusion of the personal and social identities—is theoretically weak and inconsistently invoked
across much of the IFT literature. Moreover, the theory runs into problems when it tries to extrapolate the existence of this phenomenon of
personal attachment to group-members from small-scale groups onto
large-scale ones, in which such personal relationships cannot exist.
Aims of This Book
As fusion theory becomes better established and diffused throughout different sub-fields of the social sciences, it is important to take stock of the
state of the literature today. IFT’s achievements and strengths have been
summarised in literature reviews and meta-analyses before (e.g., Gómez
et al., 2020; Henríquez et al., 2020), however, the growing volume of
publications on the topic allows us to cast a critical look at certain theoretical assumptions and research practices which have, by now, become
entrenched in identity fusion research. This book is an attempt to initiate
a debate to that end.
The present book offers a theoretical and methodological critique of
the Identity Fusion literature. To our knowledge, this is the first publication that offers such a systematic critique of IFT in its entirety, beyond
isolated commentaries on individual research papers. We believe that IFT’s
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M. SIROMAHOV AND A. HATA
weaknesses, both as a social psychological theory and as a research programme, are so numerous that they fundamentally undermine its integrity.
In the process, we will attempt to challenge all of IFT’s foundational
claims that we have summarised up to this point—from the hypothetical
interactions between the personal and social identities and the validity of
the concept of ‘identity fusion’ to the possibility of ‘extended fusion’ with
nation-sized groups, individuals, and abstractions.
We arrived at this position in the process of writing the book. Its first
author began this journey as an insider to the Identity Fusion approach
using the theory in his doctoral studies (Siromahov, 2020) and his published research (Siromahov et al., 2020), and in 2021 set out to write a
short commentary criticising IFT’s overreliance on hypothetical cognitive
processes, the inconsistent use of measurements, and some theoretical
problems with extending fusion onto nations and abstractions. That critique grew as more inconsistencies and gaps became apparent, particularly
in the way IFT handles ideas borrowed from the Social Identity approach
and in its lack of concern for distinguishing fusion from identification in
practice. At that point a more systematic approach was required, which led
us to conduct a review of the identity fusion literature up to 2021, the
results of which we report here. In the process, our stance on IFT has
shifted from one of critical support with suggestions for future theoretical
clarifications and methodological improvements to a wholesale rejection
of the theory.
Structure and Approach
The following two chapters deal with the early publications on IFT (spanning the years from 2009 to 2014) and explore the theory’s foundational
claims. In Chap. 2, we argue that IFT’s grounding in the earlier and much
better-established Social Identity tradition is plagued by fundamental misinterpretations (specifically regarding the notions of personal and social
identity and depersonalisation) that undermine its own original concept of
‘identity fusion’. Chapter 3 deals with IFT’s hard-cognitivist and reductionist interpretation of social behaviour. We demonstrate that the theory
treats identities as entities in the mind that drive behaviour, and ‘relational
ties’—as a mere perception that can be ‘projected’ onto anyone, including
strangers. This approach allows fusion theorists to extend IFT to national
and other large-scale groups, but is also revealed to be under-theorised,
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1
INTRODUCTION
7
unsupported with evidence, and pregnant with the possibility of future
misunderstandings about the theory’s main claims.
Chapter 4 offers a critique of IFT’s experimental research methods,
arguing that, in addition to being poorly theorised, its main variables are
also poorly operationalised—the established self-report measures of fusion
are not designed to capture the kind of ‘fusion of the personal and social
selves’ that the theory is meant to describe. The chapter demonstrates the
inconsistent treatment of the concept of fusion across different studies and
offers a brief reinterpretation of the meaning of self-report data obtained
using such measures from a discursive perspective.
Chapter 5 then traces the evolution of IFT’s research programme up
until 2021. In it, we argue that the concept of fusion has been stripped of
much of its technical specificity and is today often used in a shallow and
non-specific way as meaning a generic sense of strong attachment to something. We also demonstrate that, after an initial string of publications demonstrating identity fusion’s conceptual distinctiveness from other forms of
alignment with groups, subsequent papers have eschewed such careful differentiation, collapsing the meaning of fusion into a generic sense of
belonging to a group, and thus undermining the interpretability of much
of their findings.
Much of the debates on IFT aim to reconcile incongruent experimental
findings or to map out identity fusion’s relationships with other quantifiable variables—in effect, relying on empirical findings to drive future
developments in the realm of theory. In our critique we have taken the
opposite approach by prioritising a discussion of theoretical gaps and
inconsistencies above empirical findings. As we will argue in Chap. 5, the
more recent shortcomings in identity fusion research (such as the inconsistent and inappropriate research methods, the confusion about basic
aspects of the theory, and the flattening and blurring of the concept of
fusion itself) lie downstream from fundamental weaknesses in how the
theory was formulated at its inception. A critical assessment of IFT’s
empirical findings is therefore secondary to the critique of its poorly theorised and operationalised constructs on which the empirical research rests.
In our approach we owe an intellectual debt to critics of the cognitive
approach to social psychology, particularly coming from a discursive perspective (e.g., Harré, 2001; Potter & Wetherell, 1987; Billig, 1987).
Michael Billig’s critique of experimental social psychology (Billig, 2011,
2013) in particular has had a profound influence on the present work, and
some of his criticisms of contemporary academic research are echoed here.
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8
M. SIROMAHOV AND A. HATA
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