Not in My Name: A Social Psychological Study of Antecedents and Consequences of Acknowledgment of In-Group Atrocities (original) (raw)
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Collective Regret versus Collective Guilt: Different Emotional Reactions to Historical Atrocities
A distinction between guilt and regret in reactions to ingroup atrocities is proposed. Four studies (total N = 1,249) support the notion that guilt and regret are distinct emotional reactions. Whereas guilt is a self-focussed, aversive emotional reaction following from appraisals of responsibility and associated with the intention to make amends, regret follows from an empathic victim perspective, is less aversive and more strongly associated with positive attitudes towards the victim groups and the intention to engage in intergroup contact. These findings suggest that less aversive emotions like regret are more likely to improve intergroup attitudes after a common history of conflict but the aversive experience of guilt might be more potent in motivating reparations.
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Appealing to common humanity is often suggested as a method of uniting victims and perpetrators of historical atrocities. In the present experiment (N = 109), we reveal that this strategy may actually work against victim groups' best interests. Appealing to common humanity (versus intergroup identity) increased forgiveness of perpetrators but independently also served to lower intentions to engage in collective action. Both effects were mediated but not moderated by reduced identification with the victim group. We, thus reveal an important feature of appeals to common humanity: That this strategy may reduce social change at the same time as helping to promote more positive intergroup attitudes. These novel findings extend research on the human identity to a new theoretically interesting and socially important domain.
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In two experimental studies, we examined how the ongoing negative consequences for victims of genocides committed by Germans influence the acceptance of collective guilt in young Germans living today. Experiment 1 showed that collective guilt is undermined when the genocide against the Herero people in Namibia is framed as having no impact on contemporary tribe members. The downstream consequence was reduced reparatory intentions. Extending these results, Experiment 2 replicated these findings in the context of Nazi crimes against Jews. In addition we manipulated to what degree the compliance with the Holocaust was perceived as intentional, a widely debated issue in Holocaust studies. In line with predictions derived from attribution theory, collective guilt and reparatory intentions were particularly prevalent when the Holocaust was explained as the result of deliberate intentions of the ingroup. Implications for ingroup responses to historical harmdoing are discussed. WHEN THE PAST IS FAR FROM DEAD 3
Acknowledgment after mass violence: Effects on psychological well-being and intergroup relations
Group Processes and Intergroup Relations, 2014
Four experiments in the context of the Armenian Genocide (Study 1), the Kielce Pogrom (Study 2), and the Holocaust (Studies 3 and 4) examined the effects of experiencing acknowledgment (vs. lack of acknowledgment) of historical ingroup victimization on psychological well-being and on intergroup relations. Armenian and Jewish American participants, respectively, read about the former perpetrator group's acknowledgment or lack of acknowledgment of the ingroup's victimization. Participants in the acknowledgment condition reported higher levels of psychological well-being (indicated by more positive and less negative affect) and greater willingness to reconcile with the former perpetrator group, compared to participants in the no acknowledgment condition and to a neutral baseline control condition (Study 4). Two studies also revealed significant effects on resentment of the perpetrator group.
European Journal of Social Psychology, 2009
The present research investigates how reading stories about past mistreatment of children who had been in institutional care affects support for reparations, perceived difficulty of reparations and group-based guilt were investigated in two experiments. In Study 1 we showed that, when the stories increased in perceived harm, so did the perceived difficulty of making reparations whereas group-based guilt decreased. Furthermore, both perceived difficulty of making reparations and group-based guilt predicted support for reparation. It was suggested that these findings were due to a natural confound between the severity of harm and the difficulty of reparations. Study 2 included a direct manipulation of perceived difficulty that was intended to weaken or strengthen the ability to make reparations. This study demonstrated stronger group-based guilt when reparations were potentially possible and not when they are impossible. Moreover, support for reparations varied as a function of perceived difficulty of reparations and group-based guilt mediated that relationship. The research has two key implications. First, advocates of reparations as a mechanism for reconciliation and community healing need to consider the degree to which reparations are perceived to be possible and consider ways of addressing those perceptions. Second, the research provides an experimental demonstration to the power of stories about experience to bolster support for social change.
Linking Theory and Practice: The Conduct of Sociology. 87th Annual Meeting of the Pacific Sociological Association, Pacific Sociological Association, Oakland, USA (20160330-20160402). ”War Violence, Sexual War Violence and Victimhood in Reconciliation Narratives of Survivors from the War in Bosnia and Herzegovina” (Panel with Presenters). In this analysis of the retold experiences of 27 survivors of the war in northwestern Bosnia, the aim is to describe the informants’ portrayal of “war violence”, “sexual war violence”, “victimhood”, and “reconciliation” as a social phenomenon as well as analyzing the discursive patterns that contribute to constructing the category “victim” and “perpetrator”. The violence practice during the war is portrayed as organized and ritualized and this creates a picture that the violence practice became a norm in the society, rather than the exception. When, after the war, different categories claim a “victim” status, it sparks a competition for victimhood. All informants are eager to present themselves as victims while at the same time the other categories’ victim status are downplayed. The stories of reconciliation are connected to the past; the interactive consequences of war-time violence are intimately linked to the narrator’s war experiences. The interviewees distance themselves from some individuals or described situations. It is common that the portrayal of possible reconciliation is transformed into a depicted implacable attitude, thus the interviewees negotiate their stances: they articulate between reconciliation and implacability statements. This study shows that after the war in Bosnia, the interpretations of biographical consequences of violence are intimately connected to previous war experiences. Narratives on the phenomenon “war violence” and “sexual war violence” depict a decay of pre-war social order. The use of violence during the war is described as organized and ritualized, which implies that the use of violence became a norm in society, rather than the exception. The narratives on the phenomenon “war violence” produce and reproduce the image of human suffering and slaughter. Those subjected to violence are portrayed in a de-humanized fashion and branded as suitable to be exposed to it. In these stories, morally correct actions are constructed as a contrast to the narratives on war violence. In these descriptions, the perpetrator is depicted as a dangerous, evil, and ideal enemy. He is portrayed as a real and powerful yet alien criminal who is said to pose a clear threat to the social order existing before the war. The narratives on wartime violence, war perpetrators, and those subjected to violence during war are enhanced with symbolicism of ritualized ethnic violence (“cockade,” “chetnik,” “Serb,” “Muslim,” “warlord”). On one hand, the narrators make an ethnic generalization based on the differences between the ethnic categorizations; on the other hand, they present their own physical existence and ethnic identity and that of those subjected to violence as being threatened by the violent situation. The disintegration of the existing, pre-war social order produces and reproduces a norm resolution that enables the ritualized war-time use of violence. This development allows the normalization of war violence in this time period even though the result, as this study shows, means human suffering and the slaughter of humans. This study presents this development in society ambivalently, as both allowed and normatively correct (during the war) and as prohibited and condemned (primarily in retrospect, in post-war narratives). It seems as if the category “war violence” and “sexual war violence” means different things depending on whether it happened during war or not, whether it is retold or observed, and who is telling the story. For some persons, violence targeting civilians during the war is an act of heroism. The Holocaust during World War Two was in many cases highly efficient and industrialized; the typical goal was to kill from a distance, impersonally. Researchers have noted that those who climbed the ranks to leadership positions or were in charge at concentration camps seemed to have engaged in very personal, sadistic acts in Germany during WWII. Is there an interaction of rank/power in wartime and level of motivation/energy input required for violence (ie, those in charge require less energy input because of the factors that put them in charge in the first place)? The stories and phrasing in this paper emphasize a distant, evil, and/or powerful leader who motivates the crowd (perhaps in part by symbolically reducing an ethnic target to something like a dog or rat) or gives orders, with the distinction from Holocaust violence that the leaders in these stories were neighbors, etc., of those they were harming and killing. In general contrast, the war violence in Bosnia was more broadly characterized by the individualized use of violence, in which the perpetrators often knew those subjected to violence. The stories reveal that firearms were seldom used; instead, the weapons were baseball bats or knives. These features can be compared to examples of violence in Rwanda, where the violence was more similar (and even more “savage”) to that in my material than the typical examples of industrialized extermination violence of World War Two. The perpetrators in this study are often portrayed as people who enjoyed humiliating, battering, murdering, and inflicting pain in different ways. This characterization is a contrast to Collins (2008), who suggests that soldiers are not good in acting out close violence and that individuals are mostly inclined to consensus and solidarity. An explanation, in my study, of the soldiers’ actions can be that soldiers in a war are pressured into being brave in close combat, the aim being to reign over the Others, the enemy. During war, enemies are targets of violence, to be subjected to it and neutralized. Soldiers and police in northwestern Bosnia were not close to any battlefield, and civilians thus were framed in the enemy role. By exposing civilians to violence, soldiers proved their supremacy over the enemy even when the enemy was an abstract type, unarmed and harmless. Another explanation might be found in the degree of mobilization and emotional charge that occurred before the war, through the demonization of the enemy. People were probably brutalized through this process. Those interpersonal interactions that caused the violence continue even after the violent situation is over. Recollections from perpetrators and those subjected to violence of the war do not exist only as verbal constructions in Bosnia of today. Stories about violent situations live their own lives after the war and continue being important to individuals and social life. Individuals who were expelled from northwestern Bosnia during the war in the 1990s are, in a legal sense, in a recognized violence-afflicted victim category. They suffered crimes against humanity, including most types of violent crimes. Several perpetrators were sentenced by the Hague Tribunal and the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina on War Crime. The crimes committed in northwestern Bosnia are qualified as genocide according to indictments against former Serbian leaders Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić. All of the interviewees in this study experienced and survived the war in northwestern Bosnia. These individuals have a present, ongoing relation with these communities: Some live there permanently, and some spend their summers in northwestern Bosnia. An analysis of the processing of experienced or described violent situations in a society that exists as a product of a series of violent acts during the war must be conducted in parallel both at the institutional and individual levels. Institutions in the administrative entity Republika Srpska deny genocide, and this approach to war-time events becomes a central theme in future, post-war analysis of the phenomena “war violence,” “sexual war violence”, “victimhood,” and “reconciliation”. The existence of Republika Srpska is based on genocide committed in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Therefore, it is very important to analyze the political elite’s denial of the systematic acts of violence during the war that have been conveyed by the Hague Tribunal, the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina on War Crime, and Bosnian media. The narratives in my empirical material seem to be influenced by (or coherent with) the rhetoric mediated in these fora. When informants emphasize extermination and the systematization of violence during the war, they produce and reproduce the image of a mutual struggle on a collective level. The aim of this struggle seems to be that the described acts of violence be recognized as genocide.
Victimhood, Forgiveness and Reconciliation: in Stories of Bosnian War Survivors
2015
In this analysis of the retold experiences of 27 survivors of the war in northwestern Bosnia, the aim is to describe the informants’ portrayal of “victimhood”, “forgiveness” and “reconciliation” as a social phenomenon as well as analyzing the discursive patterns that contribute to constructing the category “victim” and “perpetrator”. When, after the war, different categories claim a “victim” status, it sparks a competition for victimhood. All informants are eager to present themselves as victims while at the same time the other categories’ victim status are downplayed. In this reproduction of competition for the victim role, all demarcations that were played out so successfully during the war live on. The stories of forgiveness and reconciliation are connected to the past; the interactive consequences of war-time violence are intimately linked to the narrator’s war experiences. The interviewees distance themselves from some individuals or described situations. It is common that the ...
Forgive and Forget? Antecedents and Consequences of Intergroup Forgiveness in Bosnia and Herzegovina
Political Psychology, 2008
The present study examines the effects of contact and common-ingroup identification on intergroup forgiveness and outgroup behavioral tendencies. A sample of Bosnian Muslims (N = 180) were asked to report their readiness to forgive the misdeeds committed by Bosnian Serbs during the 1992-95 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. A path analysis of the presumed antecedents and consequences of forgiveness revealed that frequent and good quality contact with members from the perpetrator group predicted forgiveness (positively) and desire for social distance (negatively). Moreover, the positive relationship between contact and forgiveness was mediated by empathy and trust towards the outgroup and by perceived outgroup heterogeneity. Common-ingroup identification was also found to be positively associated with forgiveness and negatively with social distance towards the outgroup. Finally, intergroup forgiveness also predicted social distance from the outgroup. The theoretical and applied implications of these findings are discussed.