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 technical stakes of this distinction are considerable. In empirical science, the status of a claim — whether it functions as a hypothesis to be tested or as an established fact to be assumed — determines everything downstream: which research questions get asked, which methodologies are deployed, which alternative explanations are considered, and which findings are treated as anomalies rather than confirmations. Redstone’s argument is that when a causal claim is treated as settled, scholars lose any reason to explore competing explanations for observed disparities, and simultaneously acquire every reason to suspect the motives of colleagues who propose them. The assumption, she contends, has become so foundational to the practice and teaching of sociology in the United States that it steers research agendas, shapes student training, defines what counts as serious scholarship, and silences debate before it can begin.

Tracing the intellectual genealogy of this shift, Redstone identifies an unexpected catalyst: the Supreme Court’s 1971 decision in Griggs v. Duke Power Co. In that landmark case, the court ruled that the energy company’s employment policy — which conditioned hiring and job transfers on holding a high school diploma and passing two written tests — violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act by limiting job opportunities for Black candidates. The ruling established what legal scholars call disparate impact doctrine, holding that employment practices need not be intentionally discriminatory to be unlawful if they produce unequal outcomes across racial groups without sufficient business justification. According to Redstone, this decision functionally embedded a causal claim — that disparate outcomes are produced by discrimination — into American law, and attached a moral valence to that claim in the process.

The moral dimension is central to Redstone’s analysis. Labeling an outcome discriminatory, she writes, is not merely describing a statistical pattern; it is assigning blame, even when the practice that produced the outcome was adopted without any intent to exclude. This is a subtle but consequential move in the logic of social science. A descriptive claim — that a disparity exists — is verifiable through data collection and statistical analysis. A causal claim — that discrimination produced the disparity — requires additional evidence ruling out alternative explanations. A moral claim — that someone is responsible for the disparity — carries an entirely different evidentiary and normative structure. Redstone argues that the post-Griggs environment collapsed these three distinct claim types into one another, so that observing an unequal outcome became sufficient grounds for asserting both its discriminatory cause and its moral condemnation.

Before the court’s decision, Redstone notes, sociological research of the 1960s and 1970s was methodologically pluralistic enough that researchers investigating racial disparities could and did explore alternative explanations. The hypothesis that institutional racism might be causing some or all of the differing outcomes was one possibility among many in their analytical toolkits, competing alongside explanations rooted in economics, geography, family structure, institutional resource allocation, and other factors. The Griggs decision, in her account, justified treating as settled the question of whether disparate outcomes were caused by discrimination or by other factors — and the ramifications extended far beyond law into academia, altering prevailing conceptions of harm, justice, group identity, and knowledge itself.

To assess the effects on contemporary scholarship, Redstone examines findings from several studies published over the past 25 years. The authors of those studies, which explored racial disparities in student discipline, health outcomes, criminal justice, and generational wealth accumulation, each concluded that the differences they documented were indicative of institutional racism. Redstone is careful to state that her point is not that these conclusions are necessarily wrong. Each of them, she writes, may be capturing something real about institutions’ resource allocations and about how disadvantage persists or grows across time. Her objection concerns the inferential structure: once it became widely accepted that inequities were themselves evidence that institutional racism produced them, the implications compounded, changing what discrimination was understood to look like and how pervasive it was believed to be. The reasoning became circular — disparities prove discrimination, and discrimination explains disparities.

According to Redstone, this circularity gave rise to a new organizing principle in which injustice became measured around group identity. Any negative outcome associated with a group that could be categorized as disadvantaged became presumptively attributed to the disadvantage that the identity carries. In this framework, identity does double duty: it not only indicates who experiences a given outcome but also explains why they experience it. The causal and moral weight attached to group identity subsequently reorganized scholarship across virtually every domain of sociological research, including health, education, criminal justice, culture, and labor markets. Conversely, outcomes experienced by majority groups came to be interpreted as the products of the same system operating in reverse — as unearned advantage — a reading that, Redstone argues, disregards the possibility that these results might stem from other complex factors deserving independent investigation.

The costs of dissent within this framework are asymmetric and severe. Challenging the assumption that institutional discrimination is the primary explanation for racial disparities carries different consequences depending on who voices the challenge, but for anyone, Redstone observes, dissent can be read as indifference to injustice or as complicity in it. Skeptics risk being accused of blaming the victim, and their skepticism itself may be treated as evidence of the very bias they are questioning — a self-sealing logical structure in which denial of the claim confirms the claim. Once disparities are presumed to be produced by discrimination, proposing a non-discriminatory explanation is, by definition, denying that discrimination is occurring. Redstone emphasizes that this moral logic cannot be softened or set aside while the original claim remains settled, because it follows directly from the claim itself. This is precisely why the claim’s epistemic status — hypothesis or fact — matters so much for everything built upon it.

The irony at the heart of the paper, Redstone concludes, is that sociology’s wholesale adoption of this central framework has compromised the discipline’s own capacity to examine its institutional processes and their impact — a reflexive blind spot in a field whose core mission is precisely that kind of institutional self-scrutiny. Redstone explores these themes in greater depth in her forthcoming book, Presumption of Guilt: How Equating Inequality with Injustice Fractured American Democracy, to be published in April 2027 by Pitchstone Publishing. In the book, she analyzes the implications of the broader ideological shift for American democratic institutions, arguing that they undermined a key element of their survival by treating the contested moral claim that inequality is inherently unjust as a settled question. Once inequality is equated with injustice, she argues, it morally recodes an entire worldview concerning justice, oppression, identity, and a wide range of topics extending well beyond inequality itself. The paper, published on 27 August 2026 and based on content analysis, invites sociologists to restore the empirical discipline that once allowed competing hypotheses about disparity to be weighed on their evidence rather than judged by their moral implications.

Subject of Research: The treatment of systemic racism as a default causal explanation for racial disparities in American sociology

Article Title: Paper explores systemic racism as the default explanation for disparities

Article References: Paper explores systemic racism as the default explanation for disparities. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: sociology, systemic racism, racial disparities, Griggs v. Duke Power, disparate impact, Theory and Society, Ilana Redstone, research methodology, group identity, academic debate, Civil Rights Act, moral epistemology