{"id":6,"date":"2016-02-29T20:42:32","date_gmt":"2016-02-29T20:42:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/labs.la.utexas.edu\/swann\/?page_id=6"},"modified":"2026-03-28T19:15:18","modified_gmt":"2026-03-28T19:15:18","slug":"home","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/labs.la.utexas.edu\/swann\/","title":{"rendered":"Home"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0\"beautifuljennertree\"<\/a> \"swannlabimg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Bill Swann is Professor Emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin.\u00a0 He has moved to Eugene Oregon where he is affiliated with the University of Oregon.\u00a0 He received his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota and undergraduate degree from Gettysburg College. Bill has been a Fellow at Princeton University and at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He has also been elected a fellow of the American Psychological Association and the American Psychological Society. He has received multiple research scientist development awards from the National Institutes of Mental Health and research awards from the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Mental Health and the National Institute on Drug Abuse. In 2010, he served as President of the Society of Experimental Social Psychology. In 2016, he received the Distinguished Lifetime Career Award from the International Society for Self and Identity.<\/p>\n

Bill’s most recent emphasis has been on identity fusion theory<\/a>. \u00a0People become fused with a group when they feel a viseral sense of connectedness with a group, so strong that the borders between the self and the group become porous and permeable. One reason why fusion is important and interesting is that fused persons express willingness to engage in extraordinary behaviors in the service of their group membership. For example, in a large international study of participants from six continents<\/a>, those who were strongly fused with their country were especially willing to endorse fighting and dying for their country. Further, in one set of studies<\/a> involving some interpersonal variations of the trolley dilemma, fused persons endorsed jumping to their deaths in front of runaway trolley to save the lives of their fellow countrymen. In a later set of studies that featured different trolley dilemmas<\/a>, we learned that strongly fused persons experienced an elevated level of emotional engagement with the group and this emotional connection overrode their desire for self-preservation and compelled them to translate their moral beliefs into self-sacrificial behavior.The implications of identity fusion for reactions to ostracism<\/a> from the group have also been explored, as well as the effects of physiological arousal on pro-group behavior<\/a>, and the relation of fusion with one’s party to predictions about one’s life quality after the 2008 elections<\/a>. Bill has also been collaborating with an international group led by Harvey Whitehouse at Oxford on a project involving religious ritual and group behavior<\/a>.The collaboration has also produced a recent paper based on a study of rebels in the 2011 Libyan revolution against Gadaffi<\/a>. The work showed that militia-men who were strongly fused to their battalions were more likely to wind up on the front lines rather that providing logistical support. More recent analyses have linked identity fusion to a wide variety of contemporary issues, including conflict in the Middle East<\/a>, the decision to undergo sex-reassignment surgery<\/a>,\u00a0gun control and the NRA,<\/a>\u00a0the tendency for group members to protect immoral ingroup members<\/a>, persecution of muslims,<\/a>\u00a0and college retention<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Bill may be best known for developing self-verification theory<\/a>, which focuses on people’s desire to be known and understood by others. The theory assumes that once people develop firmly held beliefs about themselves, they come to prefer that others see them as they see themselves–even if their self-views are negative. For example, married people with negative self-views are more committed to the relationship if their spouse views them negatively. In fact, if such individuals are viewed positively, they run a\u00a0 higher risk of divorce! Research <\/a>has applied this theory to understanding phenomena ranging from reactions to procedural justice in organizations, the productivity of members of work groups and teams, and extreme group behavior, such as fighting for one’s group. In addition, the cross cultural universality of self-verification strivings<\/a> has been examined.<\/p>\n

Identity negotiation theory<\/a> is another focus of Bill’s work. Identity negotiation refers to the processes whereby people in relationships reach agreements regarding \u201cwho is who.\u201d Once reached, these agreements govern the way people relate to one another, as they establish what people expect of one another. In this way, identity negotiation processes provide the interpersonal \u201cglue\u201d that holds relationships together. In recent years, Bill has become interested in how identity negotiation processes unfold in groups, especially in organizational settings.<\/a><\/p>\n

Bill has developed several measures of individual differences, including measures of self-concept, self-esteem, verbal inhibition,\u00a0and most recently, pictorial and verbal measures of identity fusion .<\/p>\n

To order Resilient Identities: Self, relationships, and the construction of social reality<\/i>, click here)<\/a>.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

E-mail<\/b>:\u00a0swann@utexas.edu<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0 Bill Swann is Professor Emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin.\u00a0 He has moved to Eugene Oregon where he is affiliated with the University of Oregon.\u00a0 He received his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota and undergraduate degree from Gettysburg College. Bill has been a Fellow at Princeton University and at the Center […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":103,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_uag_custom_page_level_css":"","footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-6","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry","entry"],"uagb_featured_image_src":{"full":false,"thumbnail":false,"medium":false,"medium_large":false,"large":false,"1536x1536":false,"2048x2048":false,"site-graphic":false},"uagb_author_info":{"display_name":"djh2697","author_link":"https:\/\/labs.la.utexas.edu\/swann\/author\/djh2697\/"},"uagb_comment_info":0,"uagb_excerpt":"\u00a0 Bill Swann is Professor Emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin.\u00a0 He has moved to Eugene Oregon where he is affiliated with the University of Oregon.\u00a0 He received his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota and undergraduate degree from Gettysburg College. Bill has been a Fellow at Princeton University and at the Center…","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/labs.la.utexas.edu\/swann\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/6","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/labs.la.utexas.edu\/swann\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/labs.la.utexas.edu\/swann\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/labs.la.utexas.edu\/swann\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/103"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/labs.la.utexas.edu\/swann\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6"}],"version-history":[{"count":29,"href":"https:\/\/labs.la.utexas.edu\/swann\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/6\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":741,"href":"https:\/\/labs.la.utexas.edu\/swann\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/6\/revisions\/741"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/labs.la.utexas.edu\/swann\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}