Ritual, identity fusion, and the inauguration of president Trump: a pseudo-experiment of ritual modes theory

ABSTRACT

The US Presidential Inauguration is a symbolic event which arouses significant emotional responses among diverse groups, and is of considerable significance to Americans’ personal and social identities. We argue that the inauguration qualifies as an Imagistic Ritual. Such ritual experiences are thought to produce identity fusion: a visceral sense of oneness with the group. The 2017 Inauguration of President Trump was a unique opportunity to examine how a large-scale naturalistic imagistic ritual influences the social identities of Americans who supported and opposed President Trump. We conducted a pre-registered 7-week longitudinal investigation among a sample of Americans to examine how President Trump’s Inauguration influenced identity fusion. We predicted that the affective responses to the inauguration would predict positive changes in fusion, mediated by self-reflection. We did not find support for this. However, the inauguration was associated with flashbulb-like memories, and positive emotions at the time of the event predicted changes in fusion to both ingroup and outgroup targets. Finally, both positive and negative emotional responses inspired self-reflection, but did not mediate the relationship with fusion. We discuss the implications for models linking group psychology, fusion theory, and ritual modes. All material is freely available at the Open Science Framework: https://bit.ly/2Qu0G37.

KEYWORDS:

• Fusion
• identity
• ritual modes
• Trump
• US politics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplemental material

Supplemental data can be accessed here.

Notes

1. “Events” differ from “rituals”, and while events may share many similarities, such as being collectively experienced, emotionally intense, highly memorable, infrequent phenomenon that generate reflection and deliberation, they differ in that rituals are prescriptive, deliberate, and typically symbolic. See (Whitehouse et al., 2014).

2. We tested those who dropped out of the sample and those who remained in it on gender, political affiliation, impactfulness, helpfulness/hurtfulness of the presidency, PANAS at T1, Fusion at T1, and fight-and-die at T1. Of these constructs only the Fight-and-Die differed between groups, thus we observed no systematic differences.

3. Given the weakness in using NHST analysis to, in effect, confirm the null hypothesis and the reality that a conservative p-value effectively makes this simpler, we have indicated where the p-value would ordinarily be significant at the p < .05 level.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the H2020 European Research Council [694986].