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The “Magic” Behind Our Identity: the Impact of Self-Verification on Affective Response in Fantasy Groups
by Trisha Lobo
Faculty Advisor: William B. Swann, PhD, Graduate Student Mentor: Pelin Cunningham-Erdogdu, BA
Our self-views are the beliefs we hold about ourselves. They encourage us to seek self-verification in the form of information that preserves our self-views. When people fail to receive self-verifying evaluations, they respond by engaging in compensatory actions designed to stabilize the self-views that are not verified. Identity fusion refers to a process whereby the personal self (i.e., aspects of the individual that are unique, such as intelligence, sociability, etc.,) becomes enmeshed with a social self (i.e., aspects of the self that link the individual to a group, such as Democrat, Christian, etc.). People differ in how strongly they are fused to any given group. Those who are strongly fused should become highly emotional and upset when they receive evaluations that disconfirm their belief that they are aligned with a group, whereas those who are weakly fused to a group should be less emotional and upset when they receive the same disconfirming evaluations. This study integrated the self-verification and identity fusion constructs in a novel population—the Harry Potter Hogwarts House fantasy groups. The study revealed that participants (n=240) who were strongly fused to their Hogwarts House had more negative affective reactions when they received disconfirming feedback compared to their weakly fused counterparts. No significant differences were seen for positive affect and feedback-seeking responses. This shows that identity fusion moderated the relationship between self-verification and affective response in fantasy groups. The findings are the first to show that individuals can be strongly fused to fantasy groups in addition to groups like religious or political ones and that fusion can moderate their affective response to social feedback.