When Terror Hits Home: Identity Fused Americans Who Saw Boston Bombing Victims as “Family” Provided Aid

Abstract

When tragedy strikes a group, only some group members characteristically rush to the aid of the victims. What motivates the altruism of these exceptional individuals? Here, we provide one set of answers based on data collected before and shortly after the 15 April 2013, Boston Marathon bombings. The results of three studies indicated that Americans who were strongly “fused” with their country were especially inclined to provide various forms of support to the bombing victims. Moreover, the degree to which participants reported perceiving fellow Americans as psychological kin statistically mediated links between fusion and pro-group outcomes. Together, these findings shed new light on relationships between personal and group identity, cognitive representations of group members, and personally costly, pro-group actions.

Keywords::

• Identity fusion
• Group identity
• Pro-group behavior
• Psychological kinship

We thank Ashle Bailey and Adam Gilreath for their comments on an earlier version of this article.

Notes

^1. In Studies 1–3, participants also completed Mael and Ashforth's (1992) identification scale and demographics (age, gender, and ethnicity). In preliminary analyses, we conducted regression analyses with age, gender, and ethnicity as simultaneous predictors of each outcome. In no case did these predictors approach the p = .05 level of significance (all t or Wald < 1.8, p>.18). Thus, we did not include them in further analyses. In other preliminary analyses, we conducted regressions with identification and fusion as simultaneous predictors of study outcomes. Consistent with previous studies of identity fusion (see Swann et al., 2012), fusion was moderately or strongly related to each of the outcome variables, whereas identification was unrelated to each of the outcome variables. Additionally, for each study outcome, we conducted mediation analyses including identification as a control variable in models with fusion as predictor and kin-perceptions as mediator. Identification did not qualify the effects of fusion and kin-perceptions in these analyses. Given these results and our theoretical focus on the fusion construct in this article, we have focused our main analyses on fusion for purposes of brevity and clarity. Additional analyses may be obtained from the first author upon request. Lastly, as is common in online data collection settings, a small number of participants in each study (i.e., 12 in the preliminary study, 2 in Time 2 of Study 1, 8 in Study 2, and 10 in Study 3) provided incomplete responses possibly due to loss of Internet connection or deciding to dropout, and were thus dropped from the data-sets prior to analyses. Study N's reported in main text reflect the N's after these incomplete cases were dropped.

The author(s) declare no potential conflicts of interests with respect to the authorship and/or publication of this article. Ideas expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the granting agencies.

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation [grant number BCS-1124382] to Swann; the Economic and Social Research Council [grant number REF RES-060-25-0085] to Whitehouse, Lanman, Swann, and Buhrmester; the John Templeton Foundation [grant number 37624] to Whitehouse, Lanman, and Buhrmester.