Is National Identity Harmless to Ingroup Members? Leveraging Ingroup Favoritism and Moral Foundation to Promote Online Fandom Donation

Social media is not only a contested space for fandoms vying for attention and influence, but also an important platform for carrying out a range of philanthropic actions. However, existing research overlooks the effects of fans’ ingroup favoritism and outgroup hostility—do these two sides of social identity stimulate or inhibit fans’ prosocial behavior towards ingroup members? Independent and bounded theoretical perspectives on ingroup favoritism and outgroup hostility offer opposing propositions. Moreover, existing research has yet to address how the moral language and frames invoked by fans influence their prosocial behavior. In this study, we propose the social identity theory of moral effects (SIME), which posits that moral foundations play a critical mediating role between social identity and prosocial action. By constructing a four-wave panel dataset of 1,957 Chinese fans, we examine the influence of a broader form of social identity (i.e., national identity) and moral language on fandom philanthropy during public crises to address the theoretical question. We find that ingroup favoritism and individualizing moral language stimulate fandom donations, whereas outgroup hostility and binding moral foundations weaken them. Furthermore, the causal mediation analysis reveals that language based on these moral foundations is a key mechanism, indirectly mediating the effects of social identity on fandom donations. We discuss the theoretical and practical contributions of these findings.