The research team, led by Ángel Gómez of the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia in Madrid together with colleagues in Spain, the United States, and Sri Lanka, distinguished between two kinds of defusion. Hypothetical defusion refers to reasons people believe could, in the future, dissolve their feeling of unity with a group. Real defusion refers to the motives that genuinely caused such a rupture in the past. The team also asked whether the mechanisms observed in ordinary groups extend to groups that have exercised collective violence, examining both current members of a Spanish hooligan firm and former members of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the insurgent organization that fought for a separate Tamil homeland in Sri Lanka until its defeat in 2009.

The methodological approach was deliberately open-ended. Rather than presenting participants with a fixed menu of options, the researchers used a qualitative strategy grounded in interpretative phenomenology, asking people to spontaneously generate reasons and then coding those responses through a three-cycle process with independent judges. This design allowed unexpected categories to emerge. Across the studies, three main reasons surfaced: degrading relational ties, meaning deteriorating sentiments toward individual group members; degrading collective ties, meaning deteriorating sentiments toward the group as a whole; and external factors, circumstances beyond the individual’s control. A fourth, unplanned category also appeared: the unfeasibility of defusion, in which participants denied that any complete detachment from the group was even possible.

Study 1 recruited 223 Spanish adults and asked them to think of a group with which they felt maximally fused, either a local group such as family or friends, where members know one another directly, or an extended group such as their city or country, where most members never meet. Participants confirmed strong fusion on a verbal scale, then wrote three reasons that could break that connection. Relational tie degradation dominated, cited by roughly 51 percent of participants, far ahead of external factors at about 27 percent, collective ties at about 20 percent, and unfeasibility at under 3 percent. Statistical comparisons using McNemar’s tests confirmed that relational ties were mentioned significantly more often than every other category.

The group’s nature mattered, but only in specific ways. People fused with local groups cited relational problems—lack of unity, bad atmosphere, selfishness, insincerity—more often than those fused with extended groups, while those thinking about extended groups more often pointed to clashes with the group’s values, principles, or objectives. This pattern fits the theoretical logic: in small face-to-face groups, interpersonal bonds are the glue, whereas in large, abstract collectives, shared ideas carry more weight. Within relational degradation itself, problems among group members were reported more frequently than problems between the individual and the group, such as feeling betrayed or personally devalued.

Study 2 scaled the design up to 568 participants and compared ascribed groups, which people belong to by birth or assignment, such as family or nationality, with chosen groups, such as friends or a sports club. The hierarchy of reasons held steady: relational ties first, external factors second, collective ties third. Notably, participants fused with ascribed groups were significantly more likely to say defusion was unfeasible, a finding consistent with the material and psychological difficulty of abandoning a group one never chose to join. Overall fusion levels were also higher for ascribed groups than for chosen ones.

Study 3 shifted from imagination to lived experience. Of 432 participants, 58 percent could not recall any group from which they had ever defused—striking evidence of fusion’s resilience. The remaining 181 participants described real defusions, overwhelmingly from local groups like friendships, families, and workplaces. Here the picture changed in an important way: relational tie degradation was cited by 66 percent, but external factors rose to nearly 65 percent, statistically indistinguishable from relational ties. Jobs ending, geographic distance, lack of time, and other uncontrollable circumstances proved far more powerful in reality than participants had anticipated when imagining hypothetical futures.

The two exploratory studies then tested whether these mechanisms extend to violent collectives. Study 4 surveyed 30 members of the Riazor Blues, a well-known hooligan group attached to a Spanish soccer club. All participants were fused with the group, and relational tie degradation again emerged as the leading hypothetical reason for defusion, mostly framed as internal conflict and lack of brotherhood among members. But a striking 33 percent of hooligans left the reason fields blank or denied that any reason existed, treating defusion as unfeasible—a far higher rate than in the general population samples. The authors suggest that for members of violent groups, merely imagining detachment may be difficult, painful, or perceived as risky, given the possibility of retaliation.

Study 5 broke new ground by interviewing 66 former LTTE members in community reintegration centers in Sri Lanka. To reduce social desirability bias, interviewers used third-person language, asking what key reasons had encouraged other members to abandon the organization. The results inverted the pattern seen everywhere else: external factors dominated, cited by 54 percent of respondents, with the end of the war itself the single most common reason, followed by family problems and the sheer unsustainability of the situation. Relational and collective tie degradation trailed at roughly 24 and 21 percent respectively. Notably, within relational degradation, problems between the individual and the organization outweighed problems among members, plausibly reflecting the LTTE’s harsh training practices, coercive control, and severe punishments for those suspected of disloyalty.

The overall lesson is a tension between the hypothetical and the real. When people imagine breaking away, they foreground the quality of their relationships; when they actually break away, forces beyond their control often do the work, especially in violent contexts where exit costs are high and ideology is enforced. The authors caution that their findings, drawn largely from Spanish samples and exploratory fieldwork, should not be overgeneralized, and that mention frequency does not necessarily reflect causal weight. Still, the practical implications are concrete. Interventions aimed at disengaging people from harmful groups might target relational dynamics in tightly knit local collectives, while questioning shared belief systems may work better in ideologically structured organizations. And for former insurgents, the study suggests that external openings—war’s end, family pressure, unbearable conditions—may matter more than any internal disillusionment, a nuance that could reshape how deradicalization programs are designed.

Subject of Research: Reasons for identity defusion from ordinary and violent groups

Article Title: Breaking social bonds: from hypothetical to real reasons for defusion

Article References: Gómez, Á., Martínez, M., López-Rodríguez, L., Vázquez, A., & Hettiarachchi, M. (2026). Breaking social bonds: from hypothetical to real reasons for defusion. Frontiers in Social Psychology, 4, Article 1787919. https://doi.org/10.3389/frsps.2026.1787919

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/frsps.2026.1787919

Keywords: identity fusion, defusion, social psychology, collective violence, relational ties, collective ties, deradicalization, hooligans, LTTE, group identity, extremism, disengagement

The starting point of the investigation is the observation that lynching is not random chaos. It is a form of collective violence in which civilians aggressively target an individual or group accused of committing a crime or violating an implicit social contract. Scholars have documented lynchings across Latin America and Africa, and Brazilian researchers have recorded hundreds of cases in the metropolitan region of São Paulo alone between 1980 and 2009. With the rise of social media, rumors and calls for popular justice can now spread within minutes, amplifying the risk that an accusation will end in violence before any official investigation takes place. Understanding the psychological profile of people who view such violence favorably is therefore not an academic luxury but a public safety priority.

The theoretical backbone of the study is Lawrence Kohlberg’s influential account of moral development, which distinguishes three levels of moral judgment. At the pre-conventional level, people evaluate actions mainly in terms of punishment and personal gain. At the conventional level, morality is anchored in social approval, law and order, and the maintenance of existing norms. At the post-conventional level, individuals reason from universal principles of justice and human rights that can override both self-interest and the letter of the law. Because moral judgment is inherently ordinal, the researchers treated it as such in their statistical models, using dummy variables to compare the levels while testing the same pattern of results against both reference categories, a robustness check that confirmed the findings.

Alongside moral judgment, the team examined empathy, a construct that psychologists have long debated and that can refer to several related but distinct phenomena, from affective sharing of another person’s feelings to cognitive perspective taking and concern for others’ welfare. Previous work has suggested that cognitive empathy and genuine concern, rather than purely emotional contagion, predict sensitivity to injustice suffered by others. Empathy has also been promoted in interventions designed to reduce aggressive behavior, which made it a natural candidate for testing whether the capacity to feel with a potential victim might weaken the link between moral reasoning and support for mob violence.

The central innovation of the study, however, lies in the way it disentangles the motivations that drive favorability toward lynching. The researchers distinguished social motivations, which involve the relational and collective rewards of participating in or endorsing group punishment, from emotional motivations, which involve the anger, outrage and desire for retribution that a brutal act can provoke. Crucially, they also separated two very different categories of offense: heinous crimes, such as acts of extreme violence, and property-related offenses, which cause material harm but rarely the same visceral horror. This design allowed the team to ask whether the psychological machinery behind lynching approval changes depending on what the accused person is alleged to have done.

The results of the structural equation modeling were strikingly asymmetric. For heinous crimes, the influence of moral judgment on favorability toward lynching was transmitted through both channels: social motivations showed a strong mediating effect, with an unstandardized coefficient of 0.469 and a standard error of 0.099, significant at the 0.001 level, while emotional motivations also carried a significant but smaller effect, with a coefficient of 0.169, a standard error of 0.071 and a p-value of 0.017. In other words, when the alleged offense is horrifying, both the pull of the crowd and the heat of moral outrage help translate a particular style of moral reasoning into approval of collective violence.

For property-related offenses, the picture changed dramatically. Here the pathway through social motivations was even stronger, with a coefficient of 0.876 and a standard error of 0.092, highly significant at the 0.001 level, but the emotional pathway vanished entirely: the coefficient for emotional motivations dropped to 0.028 with a standard error of 0.058 and a non-significant p-value of 0.625. This means that when the alleged crime involves property rather than bodily harm, approval of lynching appears to be almost exclusively a social phenomenon, driven by the perceived collective function of punishment rather than by personal emotional arousal. People do not need to feel enraged to endorse a mob in these cases; they only need to believe that the group’s punitive response serves a social purpose.

Perhaps the most sobering finding concerned empathy. Contrary to what many intervention designers might hope, empathy did not moderate the influence of moral judgment on any of the lists of motivations, regardless of the type of crime. Being more empathic did not buffer the relationship between lower levels of moral reasoning and favorability toward lynching. This null result carries practical weight, because it suggests that programs aimed solely at cultivating empathic feelings may be insufficient to reduce support for mob justice. The authors argue instead that the results support interventions that consider the multifactorial nature of favorability to lynching, and they single out the promotion of post-conventional justice thinking as a promising strategy for reducing it.

The implications reach well beyond Brazil. Lynching and other forms of vigilante justice flourish where trust in formal institutions is low and where rumors circulate faster than due process. The study’s findings suggest that the psychological vulnerability to endorsing such violence is structured by the level at which a person reasons about justice. Individuals operating at conventional levels, who equate morality with order and group norms, may be especially receptive to the idea that a crowd punishing a transgressor is doing legitimate moral work, particularly when the alleged offense threatens the community’s sense of safety or property. Shifting that reasoning toward principled commitments to human rights, in which even a suspected criminal retains inviolable dignity, may be the most durable psychological safeguard against participation in or approval of mob violence.

The research, which was approved by the Research Ethics Committee of the Federal University of Paraíba and supported by the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development, also makes its data available through the Open Science Framework, allowing other researchers to scrutinize and extend the model. As social media platforms continue to accelerate the spread of accusations and the mobilization of crowds, the study offers a technically grounded warning: the fight against lynching will not be won by appeals to feeling alone. It requires cultivating a deeper form of moral reasoning, one in which justice is defined by universal principles rather than by the anger of the crowd or the comfort of belonging to it.

Subject of Research: Psychosocial mechanisms underlying favorability toward lynching

Article Title: Psychosocial Mechanisms of Favorability to Lynching

Article References: de Alexandre, M. E. S., Camino, C. P. D. S., Do Bú, E., Galvão, L. K. D. S., & Pereira, C. R. (2025). Psychosocial Mechanisms of Favorability to Lynching. Trends in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43076-025-00502-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43076-025-00502-7

Keywords: lynching, moral judgment, empathy, collective violence, social motivations, emotional motivations, Kohlberg, Brazil, vigilante justice, structural equation modeling, moral psychology, social psychology