The role of identity leadership on January 6th
What the 2021 insurrection can teach us about social identity and leadership; new papers on news consumption and conspiracy theories; and congratulations to our graduates!
“And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore. Our exciting adventures and boldest endeavors have not yet begun. My fellow Americans, for our movement, for our children, and for our beloved country.”
-Donald Trump, January 6, 2021
Nearly a year and a half ago, Donald Trump addressed a crowd of at least 10,000 supporters at the Washington monument, urging them to march to the Capitol and “demand that Congress do the right thing”—that is, stop the “steal” of the 2020 election. Before he could even finish his speech, hundreds of people began to storm the Capitol, emboldened by his words and their duty to “save America.”
To many, Trump was directly responsible for the insurrection that followed. They saw the crowd’s actions as a direct response to instructions laid out in his speech: through his words, more or less, he had endorsed and intended for the crowd to storm and attack the Capitol.
After the consequences of the attack had become clear, Trump began to distance himself from the attack and the insurrectionists who carried it out. And although he was impeached by the House of Representatives, the Senate was not able to convict him for inciting the insurrection on January 6th. Republican Senators, Trump’s lawyers, and his biographers alike argued that Trump could not be held responsible for the insurrectionists’ actions. His lawyers in particular argued that the Capitol rioters acted of their own accord, as his references to the need to fight were “figurative” and “could not be construed to encourage acts of violence."
This argument from Trump and his supporters paints a narrow picture of leadership, in which leaders are akin to a puppet-master who either influences their followers directly or not at all. But is this really how leadership works?
In a new paper for Leadership Quarterly led by Alexander Haslam and 11 other scholars, we argue that this binary view of leadership fails to reflect the complex relationship between leaders and their followers, and the psychological processes that were at play on Capitol Hill in January 2021.
Instead, our dual-agency model of identity leadership and engaged followership underscores the agency of both leaders and followers. Importantly, it also stresses their mutual influence on one another. Leadership and followership, rather, can be seen as a group process that centers around both parties establishing and cultivating a shared social identity—a“sense of us.”
The result is a relationship that has the capacity to unleash powerful collective forces—for destruction (as we saw unfold on January 6th) or for for positive social change.
Using the January 6th insurrection as an “on the ground” example (in addition to other examples of leadership from history), our paper maps out the processes at play in our dual-agency model:
1. Leaders cultivate and embed a sense of shared in-group identity (or ‘us-ness’), and in turn, followers embrace this shared in-group identity.
Trump’s speech on January 6th involved clear efforts to make a shared identity salient—for example, by making use of in-group language (seen in 340 mentions of ‘we’, ‘us’ and ‘our’), invoking a sense of collective victimhood, and presenting himself as a successful proponent of the group’s interests. His followers fully embraced this shared identity, shown through their apparel and their presence on social media.
2. Leaders identify and promote in-group enhancing norms and goals, and followers understand the action necessary for advancing these goals.
In creating a cohesive in-group identity, Trump simultaneously invoked enemies to fight against (for example, Democrats and the “fake news media”), encouraged his followers to “stop the steal” and construed the goals his followers were working towards as righteous (“we have truth and justice on our side”). Trump’s followers signaling their support to in-group members on social media in addition to the day of the rally.
3. Leaders outline and facilitate the action necessary for advancing in-group enhancing goals, and followers “work towards” leaders by responding enthusiastically and creatively.
Finally, Trump’s speech provided a vision for a performance that he and his followers might achieve together, through calls to action such as “we're going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue…and we're going to the Capitol, and we're going to try and give.” His followers, in turn, attacked the Capitol.
So, what can we make of Trump’s responsibility for the January 6th insurrection? Trump played a crucial role, as his followers committed crimes not only in his name, but by virtue of the shared social identity he created and his followers internalized. But on the other hand, Trump was no puppet-master, and his followers were not merely acting as puppets. He framed and unleashed their agency to enact this shared social identity. Rather than emphasize the agency of one at the expense of the other, our model seeks to understand the full, nuanced picture of the relationship between leader and follower that recognizes and respects the agency of both.
To read more about the specifics of the psychology behind the insurrection, our dual-agency model, and how it can also be used to explain positive forces of leadership, check out the full paper here!
New papers
Why do people believe misinformation? A new paper compared by David Borukhson and colleagues found that our Identity-based model of belief is more accurate at predicting fake news beliefs than a wide variety of theoretical models of misinformation, including motivated reasoning and dual process models. You can read the full paper here.
What drives people to read (or not read) online news articles? Our new Stage 1 registered report for Nature Human Behaviour, led by PhD student Claire Robertson (and also by Stefan Feuerriegel, Nicolas Pröllochs, Kaoru Schwarzenegger, former postdoc Philip Pärnamets, and Jay), investigates how negative emotion in headlines affects the consumption of online news. Stay tuned for a deep dive on this work (and the surprising story behind its publication) coming soon!
In a new pre-registered replication and meta-analysis recently accepted at Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, recent PhD graduate Dr. Anni Sternisko, Sylvain Delouvee, and Jay explore the relationship between randomness perception and belief in conspiracy theories. We found small, but positive and robust relationships between randomness dismissal and conspiracist ideation, suggesting that the relationship between randomness dismissal and conspiracist ideation is small and contextually sensitive.
Public outreach and talks
In the wake of the tragic shootings over the past few weeks, Jay was interviewed by USAToday about how we can convince people to support restrictions such as background checks. He argues that the real issue is a lack of political action:
PhD student Claire Robertson presented her work on negativity in online news consumption (referenced earlier in this newsletter) at the NYU Polarization Conference this month!
Jay recently presented at the Kellogg School of Business Political Sectarianism Conference on the costs of polarization:
Jay was interviewed by Harvard Health about shared identity, polarization, accuracy incentives, and more:
Last, but not least, Jay’s book, The Power of Us, recently won the 2022 Nautilus award in social sciences!
RA spotlight
We wanted to take a moment to spotlight a few of our brilliant RAs, who have conducted independent research over the past year and presented their work this month at the NYU Undergraduate Research Conference!
Rachel Tang, recent graduate and this year’s Honors Thesis student, presented her work on social norms and the experience of online moral outrage:
Yara Kyrychenko, our RA and Honors Thesis student in Tessa West’s lab, presented her work at theUndergraduate Research Conference and also gave a talk in our lab on her research investigating outgroup animosity on Ukrainian social media (replicating incoming postdoc Steve Rathje, Jay, and Sander van der Linden’s work):
Anastasiia Korolevskaia, our RA for the last few years, presented her project on global citizen identity and pro-environmental behavior:
Graduation and job announcements
Huge congratulations to our lab’s graduates this year!
Dr. Anni Sternisko, former PhD student
Rachel Tang, former Honors Thesis student
Yara Kyrychenko, RA
Lily Hafez, RA
Cheryl Man, former RA
Cara Reschke, former Master’s RA (Cara also recently accepted a position as an Associate UX Researcher at Match.com!)
Christy Cheng, former RA
And finally, in exciting job news, Anna Balchunas, a previous Honors Thesis student in the lab, recently accepted a new position as a writer/editor in the development office of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.
Congratulations to all of our former lab members and grads!
In case you missed last month’s newsletter…
As always, if you have any photos, news, or research you’d like to have included in this newsletter, please reach out to Katie (nyu.vanbavel.lab@gmail.com) who writes our monthly newsletter. We encourage former lab members and collaborators to share exciting career updates or job opportunities—we’d love to hear what you’re up to and help sustain a flourishing lab community. Please also drop comments below about anything you like about the newsletter or would like us to add.
That’s all, folks—thanks for reading and we’ll see you next month!