Pretus, ClaraVilarroya, Óscar2023-02-062023-02-062022Pretus C, Vilarroya Ó. Social norms (not threat) mediate willingness to sacrifice in individuals fused with the nation. Insights from the COVID-19 pandemic. Eur J Soc Psychol. 2022 Jun; 52(4): 772-81. DOI: 10.1002/ejsp.28510046-2772http://hdl.handle.net/10230/55617Identity fusion with the community has been previously found to mediate altruism in post-disaster settings. However, whether this altruistic response is specifically triggered by ingroup threat, or whether it can also be triggered by global threats remains unclear. We evaluated willingness to sacrifice in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic across three survey waves. Against expectations, participants fused with the nation (vs. non-fused) did not differentially respond to a national versus global threat condition. Conversely, social norms decisively influenced willingness to sacrifice in this sample, with fused individuals with stronger norms about social distancing reporting the highest altruistic response during the first weeks of the pandemic. Longitudinally, after an initial peak in the altruistic response, deteriorating social norms mediated decreases in willingness to sacrifice in individuals fused with the nation (vs. non-fused). Implications of these results for the development of interventions aimed to address global challenges are discussed.application/pdfengThis is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes. © 2021 The Authors. European Journal of Social Psychology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.info:eu-repo/semantics/articlehttp://dx.doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.2851COVID‐19Costly sacrificesIdentity fusionProsocial behaviourSocial normsinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess