Strategic attitude expressions as identity performance and identity creation in interaction.

We assess the strategic alignment of attitudes and the active construction of attitude-based identity across two studies. Study one assessed the twitter response (hashtags in English) to the war in Ukraine for five months after Russia's first invasion of Ukraine 2022 (N = 8149). Results demonstrated that individuals publicly expressed hashtags similar to others close to them in the followership network, showing their support for Ukraine and condemnation of the Russian invasion in qualitatively different ways. Study two was a preregistered Prolific experiment with geographical European participants ran in September, 2022 (N = 1368). Results demonstrated that attitude interaction with ingroup members motivated interactants towards attitude alignment, and attitude alignment strengthened the identification that motivated the alignment in the first place. Results suggest that attitude expression is performative and constrained by one's group relationship with one's audience and the definition of social identity can be constrained by opinion-based identity performance.

The likes that bind: Even novel opinion sharing can induce opinion-based identification.

Research has found that psychological groups based on opinion congruence are an important group type. Previous research constructed such groups around opinions potentially connected to pre-existing identities. We strip away the socio-structural context by using novel opinions to determine whether opinion congruence alone can be a category cue which can foster identification and whether such group identification mediates the relationship between opinion exposure and opinion polarization. We assess this across two pre-registered online interactive experiments. Study 1 (N = 1168) demonstrate that opinion congruence fostered stronger identity than minimal groups. Study 2 (N = 505) demonstrate that opinion congruence fostered stronger identification than non-opinion congruence. The relationship between opinion exposure and opinion polarization occurs through group identification in both. Results demonstrate that (novel) opinions can be self-categorization cues informing identification and influencing opinion polarization.

Sharing is caring: How sharing opinions online can connect people into groups and foster identification.

Computer mediated communication has marked differences from the face-to-face context. One major difference is that, in the online context, we often have explicit access to others' opinions and these opinions are often the only informational cues available. We investigate if awareness of opinion congruence, in the absence of any other reference categories, may be sufficient to foster social identification. In a pre-registered experiment (N = 681), we manipulated exposure to opinions, and measured levels of ingroup identification, opinion-based identification and their social influence on activism intentions. Our results demonstrate exposure to others' opinions in an otherwise anonymous context fosters ingroup and opinion-based identification. There was no effect on opinion-based group activism intentions. We conclude that computer mediated contexts have consequences for identification - opinion (in)congruence is becoming more relevant as a source of social categorization. While we did not find this identification had a social influence on activism, we discuss avenues for future research to disentangle the features of opinion-based groups necessary to foster activism.