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Identity fusion – a powerful form of group alignment – is a strong predictor of using violence to defend the ingroup. However, recent theorizing suggests, in the absence of outgroup threat, fusion may instead promote intergroup trust and cooperation. Across five studies we find evidence that fusion to a range of groups (e.g., country, football team) was consistently positively associated with a willingness to trust others generally, trust outgroup members, and social exploration. An internal meta‐analysis indicated that fusion was more strongly associated with trust and social exploration, compared to several measures of group identification. These findings provide support for the fusion‐secure base hypothesis (Personality and Social Psychology Review. 2023, 27(2), 107–127) and suggest that fusion has the potential to increase a willingness to interact with, and trust, outgroup members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chronic illness has negative impacts beyond those on physical health. In particular, because it is often experienced as uncontrollable, chronic illness might reduce people's general sense of personal control and, subsequently, personal well‐being. Drawing on recent theory and research, we proposed and tested in four experiments (Ntotal = 1323) a potential buffer to these negative effects: thinking about an agentic social ingroup in one's life. In Study 1, patients suffering from a chronic illness that was either high or low in medical disease controllability were asked either to think about an agentic ingroup or a personal issue. Low perceived disease‐related control was associated with low perceived personal control only when participants' personal self, but not when their ingroup, was salient. In three follow‐up vignette studies, we asked participants to take the perspective of a person who suffered from a health problem of low medical disease controllability and attended a self‐help group that was described as either high or low in agency. The findings supported the predicted buffering effect: participants who reflected on a target suffering from a low control disease thought that the target would experience more personal control when the agentic (vs. the nonagentic) self‐help group was salient. These findings suggest ingroups can serve as a source of personal control in the context of health‐related threats to the extent that they are perceived as agentic. Thus, focusing on agentic properties of (health‐related) ingroups might be a promising novel strategy when designing effective group‐based interventions to cope with chronic illness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the present research, we introduce and develop the concept of meta‐identification – perceptions of others' identification with a group – and examine its capacity to shape group life. Across two cross‐sectional studies and three experiments (Ntotal = 3992), we investigate the relationship between participants' meta‐identification in an intragroup context and their group meaningfulness, collective self‐efficacy, organisational citizenship behaviour and (perceived and behavioural) performance. Results indicate that perceiving other group members to be highly identified with a group promotes perceptions of group meaningfulness and collective self‐efficacy, promotes organisational citizenship behaviour and enhances perceived, and in some contexts actual, group performance. Furthermore, results show that individuals' meta‐identification makes a unique contribution to outcomes above and beyond their social identification. We discuss implications for social identity theorising and the role of meta‐identification in supporting meaningful and functional group life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Engaging in the political process is one way that individuals can exert control over society in general. Yet, emerging research suggests that engaging with political groups also helps people feel more in control of the course of their own lives. The present research examined whether this is always the case, using the natural experiment afforded by political events to probe the psychological mechanisms underpinning the relationship between group identification and personal control. Two cross‐sectional studies conducted immediately after the 2016 Presidential election (total N = 752) and one longitudinal study conducted immediately before and after the 2020 Presidential election (N = 743) investigated the relationship between political group identification and personal control. Together, the studies tested whether this relationship is weakened under conditions of low agency (i.e., in a group that lost the election) and low predictability (i.e., immediately following a surprise election outcome). The results suggest that the relationship between political identification and personal control is robust except in the case of low agency and low predictability. The studies contribute to understanding the processes that link group‐level political factors with individual‐level psychological outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on the Beauty-is-Good stereotype shows that unattractive people are perceived to have worse moral character than attractive individuals. Yet research has not explored what kinds of moral character judgments are particularly biased by attractiveness. In this work, we tested whether attractiveness particularly biases moral character judgments pertaining to the moral domain of purity, beyond a more general halo effect. Across four preregistered studies (N = 1,778), we found that unattractive (vs. attractive) individuals were judged to be more likely to engage in purity violations compared with harm violations and that this was not due to differences in perceived moral wrongness, weirdness, or sociality between purity and harm violations. The findings shed light on how physical attractiveness influences moral character attributions, suggesting that physical attractiveness particularly biases character judgments pertaining to the moral domain of purity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Secrecy, privacy, confidentiality, concealment, disclosure, and gossip all involve sharing and withholding access to information. However, existing theories do not account for the fundamental similarity between these concepts. Accordingly, it is unclear when sharing and withholding access to information will have positive or negative effects and why these effects might occur. We argue that these problems can be addressed by conceptualizing these phenomena more broadly as different kinds of information-access regulation. Furthermore, we outline a social-identity theory of information-access regulation (SITIAR) that proposes that information-access regulation shapes shared social identity, explaining why people who have access to information feel a sense of togetherness with others who have the same access and a sense of separation from those who do not. This theoretical framework unifies diverse findings across disparate lines of research and generates a number of novel predictions about how information-access regulation affects individuals and groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]