At the beginning of the 19th Century, soldiers pinned her against a wall and drove bayonets into her arms and shoulders until her white blouse was soaked in blood. They put a rope around her neck and hung her until she lost consciousness. They threw her into a cell with six inches of sewage on the floor and arrested 21 members of her family, including her nine-year-old brother, who died in prison. They offered her the equivalent of $90,000 to talk about what she knew about Robert Emmet’s rebellion.
She was 25 years old.
For three years, through all of it, she said nothing. Her name was Anne Devlin. She was a farmer’s daughter from Dublin. The psychology that explains why she never broke is the same psychology that determines whether your team would go to the wall for your organization, or quietly update their LinkedIn and start looking for the exit.
Gallup’s most recent research puts global employee engagement at around 23%. That means roughly three out of every four people you work with are doing enough to keep their jobs and not much more.
What actually makes people give everything they have has nothing to do with compensation structures or quarterly check-ins. It comes down to three things.
How you are labelled.
Where you belong.
Who you become.
When you get all three right, you can transform how others show up and have your team performing at their best.
The power of belonging: How to get the best out of others
In 1970, a Polish-born psychologist named Henri Tajfel ran one of the strangest experiments in the history of social science. Tajfel was a Holocaust survivor, and the question that drove his research was one of the most important questions anyone could ask:
What does it actually take for one group of people to turn on another?
To find out, he took 64 British schoolboys and divided them into two groups. Not by personality or ability. He showed them paintings by two artists, Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, told each boy which group he was in, and that was it. You’re a Klee. You’re a Kandinsky. Off you go.
Tajfel then asked the boys to allocate money between the two groups. What he found was remarkable. Most of the boys heavily favored their own group, the arbitrary group they’d been assigned to minutes earlier, based on nothing. What made it stranger was that some boys would actually accept less money for their group, as long as it guaranteed they were still ahead of the other side. Winning mattered more than having.
This became one of the foundations of what Tajfel, along with John Turner, developed into social identity theory: the idea that the groups we belong to don’t just describe us, they become us. They shape how we see the world, what we believe, and who we think we are.
We’re not individuals who occasionally join tribes. We are tribal creatures who occasionally act as individuals.
This is where leaders either win or lose before the work even begins. The labels you give your team, the words you use to describe who they are and what they stand for, are powerful. When someone internalizes a label, “we’re the team that doesn’t miss deadlines” or “we’re the kind of people who fight for this customer,” they start filtering the world through that lens. The label tells them what the group believes. Once you’re in the group, you tend to believe what the group believes.
Be deliberate about the language you use to describe your team. Not the mission statement on the wall, but the language in the room. The phrases you repeat. The stories you tell about who they are and what they’ve done. Labels land. Use them on purpose. This also works as a parent, by the way.
The pain of being left out
Once someone carries a label, the next question is whether they actually feel like they belong. This is where the science gets uncomfortable.
Researchers developed a simple computer game called Cyberball. Participants sat down to play what they thought was an online ball-tossing game with two other players. At some point, the other two players started passing the ball only among themselves. The participant was frozen out. Left on the sidelines of a virtual game that could not possibly matter less.
What happened in the brain was crazy. The same neural regions that activate in response to physical pain lit up when people were excluded from Cyberball. Social rejection and a kick in the shin are, neurologically speaking, not entirely different experiences.
This is the system working exactly as designed. For most of human history, being expelled from your group was a death sentence. No tribe meant no protection. The brain learned very quickly to treat exclusion as an emergency, and it hasn’t updated that software since.
Solomon Asch ran a set of experiments in the 1950s that showed just how far we’ll go to avoid that emergency. He brought people into a room to do a simple visual test: which line is the longest? The correct answer was obvious. But before participants could respond, actors in the room would all confidently point to the wrong line.
In 74% of cases, participants gave the wrong answer at least once. They couldn’t bear to be the one person in the room who disagreed. When interviewed afterward, most of them said things like “I started to doubt my own eyes” and “I thought, they can’t all be wrong.” The need to belong was so strong that it quietly rewrote what they thought they saw.
Stanley Milgram demonstrated the same pull from a different angle. In a study on a New York City sidewalk, he had one person stop and look up at nothing. Four percent of passersby stopped. When he increased it to fifteen people looking up, forty percent of the people stopped. Most of them had no idea why. The group was doing it, and some part of them decided that was reason enough.
We pay a membership fee to stay in the group. And that fee is often agreement.
This creates a real tension for leaders. The same psychological pull that makes people conform to your culture will also, if left unchecked, make them conform away from honest thinking. Groupthink is what happens when belonging becomes more important than truth. The Challenger space shuttle disaster in 1986 is one of the starkest examples. Engineers at Morton Thiokol had warned against launching in temperatures below 53 degrees Fahrenheit, arguing the O-rings would fail. NASA pushed back. The group pressure was intense. The engineers, ultimately, backed down. The Challenger broke apart 73 seconds after launch, killing all seven crew members.
Build belonging deliberately, but protect the conditions for honest disagreement. Red team thinking works: assign someone the explicit job of arguing against the group’s conclusion. Make psychological safety visible by rewarding people who voice concerns, especially when it’s uncomfortable. The goal is a team that feels safe enough to belong and secure enough to dissent. Those two things are not in conflict. They’re both your job.
Becoming the mission
William Swann’s research on identity fusion describes what happens at the outer edge of group belonging. In ordinary group membership, there’s still a “you” and a “group.” They’re related, but they’re distinct. In identity fusion, that distinction collapses. The group’s goals become your goals. The group’s survival becomes your survival. The group’s enemies become your enemies. The self and the group become, for all practical purposes, the same thing.
People high in identity fusion are dramatically more likely to endorse extreme pro-group actions. More likely to sacrifice personal interest. More likely to take risks, the group needs taken. More likely to show up when everything is hard. It’s deeper than motivation. It’s the experience of fighting for yourself, because you have become what you’re fighting for.
Anne Devlin had fused so completely with the Irish Republican cause that when British soldiers drove bayonets into her arms and offered her a fortune to give Emmet up, she experienced it not as a choice but as an impossibility. To betray the cause would have been to betray herself. There was no self left that was separate enough to make that trade.
She was eventually released, later living in poverty in Dublin’s slums, working as a washerwoman, with little money and poor health. There is a statue of her just a few miles from where I grew up. History gave her almost nothing in return for everything she gave. She gave it anyway.
Robert Emmet himself was executed, but not before delivering what became one of the most celebrated speeches in Irish history, a speech that Abraham Lincoln later quoted. Emmet knew what was coming and chose the cause over his life. That is the outer limit of identity fusion. It is also the outer limit of what a human being will do for something they believe they are.
You are not asking your team to face a firing squad. But the psychology you’re reaching for when you want people to go above and beyond, to stay when things get hard, to care more than their job description requires, is the same psychology. You’re trying to close the gap between “I work here” and “I am this.”
The practical path to identity fusion runs through values alignment. The more someone can see that what they believe in, what they stand for, and what kind of person they want to be, maps onto the mission of the organization, the more their identity starts to merge with that mission. But it only works if the values are real and the mission means something.
If someone’s identity is fused with a group that’s working against them, the process runs in reverse. You don’t just disconnect people from a harmful group identity. You reconnect them to a different one. Cult deprogramming works this way: you don’t strip someone of belonging, you replace it with something else, something healthier, something that answers the same need. The belonging has to go somewhere.
Find out what your people actually care about. What do they believe in? What kind of person do they want to be? Then do the visible work of connecting those things to what your organization does and why it matters. When those two maps overlap, they stop working for you and start working for something they are. That is the difference between engagement and identity fusion. And it is the difference between someone who does the job and someone who cannot imagine not doing it.
Henri Tajfel showed that people will sacrifice real money just to win for a group they joined five minutes ago, based on a painting. The key is the story people tell themselves about who they are. Get that story right, and the performance follows. That’s what the greatest leaders do.
To learn more, check out this week’s Inner Propaganda Podcast episode.
Belief Leader of the Week
Robert Cialdini
Robert Cialdini spent years going undercover, embedding himself in sales rooms, fundraising organizations, and advertising agencies, before writing Influence, which I believe is one of the most important books ever written on why human beings say yes. His most important idea is this: persuasion is not an art form driven by charisma or luck; it is a science governed by predictable psychological principles, and once you understand those principles, you can see them operating everywhere, in everything, all the time. This felt right to anyone who had ever made a decision and later couldn’t fully explain why. It fit in with a world increasingly hungry to understand the invisible forces shaping their choices. And it made sense — the research was airtight, the examples were everywhere, and suddenly you could never read a menu, a sales pitch, or a social situation the same way again.
