Abstract
Collective guilt is a group-based emotion that extends from recognizing the ingroup has harmed others, and it is known to be predicted by factors related to the ingroup (e.g., ingroup identification, glorification) and by specific details of the event (e.g., temporal distance, ongoing victimization). The current research tested if differences in ingroup members’ broader ability to handle inconsistent information also contribute to their experience of collective guilt. In three studies, trait variation in tolerance for contradiction positively predicted collective guilt. Because the relationship could not be explained by specific ingroup perceptions, it may be that tolerance for contradiction enables ingroup members to endure the aversive emotional experience of guilt instead of responding defensively. All three studies also provided evidence that the level of overlap ingroup members perceive between the historical perpetrators and the current ingroup represents a defensive reaction to ingroup wrongdoing that contributes to reduced collective guilt, and this reaction is separate from trait-level perceptions of continuity between past and present ingroup members. Perceived overlap between historical perpetrators and the current ingroup may be a valuable measure of defensive responding in future research on collective guilt.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Baldwin, M., White, M. H., & Sullivan, D. (2018). Nostalgia for America’s past can buffer collective guilt. European Journal of Social Psychology, 48, 433–446. https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.2348.
Bastian, B., & Haslam, N. (2008). Immigration from the perspective of hosts and immigrants: Roles of psychological essentialism and social identity. Asian Journal of Social Psychology, 11, 127–140. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-839X.2008.00250.x.
Branscombe, N. R., & Wann, D. L. (1994). Collective self-esteem: Consequences of outgroup derogation when a valued social identity is on trial. European Journal of Social Psychology, 24, 641–657. https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.2420240603.
Čehajić-Clancy, S., Effron, D. A., Halperin, E., Liberman, V., & Ross, L. D. (2011). Affirmation, acknowledgment of in-group responsibility, group-based guilt, and support for reparative measures. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 101, 256–270. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0023936.
Choi, I., & Nisbett, R. E. (2000). Cultural psychology of surprise: Holistic theories and recognition of contradiction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79, 890–905. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.79.6.890.
Doosje, B., Branscombe, N. R., Spears, R., & Manstead, A. S. R. (1998). Guilty by association: when one’s ingroup has a negative history. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75, 872–886. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.75.4.872.
Federico, C. M., Golec, A., & Dial, J. L. (2005). The relationship between the need for closure and support for military action against Iraq: Moderating effects of national attachment. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 31, 621–636. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167204271588.
Ferguson, M. A., & Branscombe, N. R. (2014). The social psychology of collective guilt. In C. von Scheve & M. Salmela (Eds.), Series in affective science. Collective emotions: Perspectives from psychology, philosophy, and sociology (pp. 251–265). New York, NY, US: Oxford University Press.
Goto, N., Jetten, J., Karasawa, M., & Hornsey, M. J. (2015). The sins of their fathers: When current generations are held to account for the transgressions of previous generations. Political Psychology, 36, 479–487. https://doi.org/10.1111/pops.12172.
Gunn, G. R., & Wilson, A. E. (2011). Acknowledging the skeletons in our closet: The effect of group affirmation on collective guilt, collective shame, and reparatory attitudes. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 37, 1474–1487. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167211413607.
Hameiri, B., & Nadler, A. (2017). Looking back to move forward: Effects of acknowledgement of victimhood on readiness to compromise for peace in the protracted Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 43, 555–569. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167216689064.
History.com Editors (2009). My Lai massacre. Retrieved from [https://www.history.com/topics/vietnam-war/my-lai-massacre-1]. Accessed June 26, 2017.
Imhoff, R., Bilewicz, M., & Erb, H. (2012). Collective regret versus collective guilt: Different emotional reactions to historical atrocities. European Journal of Social Psychology, 42, 729–742. https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.1886.
Imhoff, R., Wohl, M. J. A., & Erb, H. (2013). When the past is far from dead: How ongoing consequences of genocides committed by the ingroup impact collective guilt. Journal of Social Issues, 69, 74–91. https://doi.org/10.1111/josi.12004.
Leidner, B., Castano, E., Zaiser, E., & Giner-Sorolla, R. (2010). Ingroup glorification, moral disengagement, and justice in the context of collective violence. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 36, 1115–1129. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167210376391.
Leyens, J., Rodriguez-Perez, A., Rodriguez-Torres, R., Gaunt, R., Paladino, M., Vaes, J., & Demoulin, S. (2000). Psychological essentialism and the differential attribution of uniquely human emotions to ingroups and outgroups. European Journal of Social Psychology, 31, 395–411. https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.50.
Litman, L., Robinson, J., & Abberbock, T. (2017). TurkPrime.com: A versatile crowdsourcing data acquisition platform for the behavioral sciences. Behavior Research Methods, 49, 433–442. https://doi.org/10.3758/s1342.
Lu, M., Hamamura, T., Doosje, B., Suzuki, S., & Takemura, K. (2017). Culture and group-based emotions: could group-based emotions be dialectical? Cognition and Emotion, 31, 937–949. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2016.1185394.
Ma-Kellams, C., Spencer-Rodgers, J., & Peng, K. (2011). Am I against us? Unpacking cultural differences in ingroup favoritism via dialecticism. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 37, 15–27. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167210388193.
Mackie, D. M., Maitner, A. T., & Smith, E. R. (2009). Intergroup emotions theory. In T. D. Nelson (Ed.), Handbook of prejudice, stereotyping, and discrimination (pp. 285–307). New York, NY: Psychology Press.
Mallett, R. K., Huntsinger, J. R., Sinclair, S., & Smith, J. K. (2008). Seeing through their eyes: When majority group members take collective action on behalf of an outgroup. Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, 11, 451–470. https://doi.org/10.1177/1368430208095400.
Myers, E., Hewstone, M., & Cairns, E. (2009). Impact of conflict on mental health in Northern Ireland: The mediating role of intergroup forgiveness and collective guilt. Political Psychology, 30, 269–290. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9221.2008.00691.x.
Peetz, J., Gunn, G. R., & Wilson, A. E. (2010). Crimes of the past: Defensive temporal distancing in the face of past in-group wrongdoing. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 36, 598–611. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167210364850.
Peng, K., & Nisbett, R. E. (1999). Culture, dialectics, and reasoning about contradiction. American Psychologist, 54, 741–754. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.54.9.741.
Roccas, S., Klar, Y., & Liviatan, I. (2006). The paradox of group-based guilt: Modes of national identification, conflict vehemence, and reactions to the in-group’s moral violations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 91, 698–711. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.91.4.698.
Roets, A., Kruglanski, A. W., Kossowska, M., Pierro, A., & Hong, Y.-y. (2015). The motivated gatekeeper of our minds: New directions in Need for Closure theory and research. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 52, 221–283. https://doi.org/10.1016/bs.aesp.2015.01.001.
Roets, A., & Van Hiel, A. (2011). The role of need for closure in essentialist entitativity beliefs and prejudice: An epistemic needs approach to racial categorization. British Journal of Social Psychology, 50, 52–73. https://doi.org/10.1348/014466610X491567.
Sani, F., Bowe, M., Herrera, M., Manna, C., Cossa, T., Miao, X., & Zhou, Y. (2007). Perceived collective continuity: Seeing groups as entities that move through time. European Journal of Social Psychology, 37, 1118–1134. https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.430.
Scott, W. A. (1966). Brief report: Measures of cognitive structure. Multivariate Behavioral Research, 1, 391–395. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327906mbr0103_9.
Spencer-Rodgers, J., Srivastava, S., Boucher, H. C., English, T., Paletz, S. B., & Peng, K. (2015). The dialectical self scale. California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo: Unpublished manuscript.
Spencer-Rodgers, J., Williams, M. J., Hamilton, D. L., Peng, K., & Wang, L. (2007). Culture and group perception: Dispositional and stereotypic inferences about novel and national groups. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 93, 525–543. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.93.4.525.
Spencer-Rodgers, J., Boucher, H. C., Mori, S. C., Wang, L., & Peng, K. (2009). The dialectical self-concept: contradiction, change, and holism in East Asian cultures. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 35, 29–44. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167208325772
Spencer-Rodgers, J., Williams, M. J., & Peng, K. (2010). Cultural differences in expectations of change and tolerance for contradiction: A decade of empirical research. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 14, 296–312. https://doi.org/10.1177/1088868310362982.
Tajfel, H., & Turner, J. C. (1986). The social identity theory of intergroup conflict. In S. Worschel & W. G. Austin (Eds.), Psychology of intergroup relations (pp. 7–24). Chicago, IL: Nelson-Hall.
Trope, Y., Ferguson, M., & Raghunatan, R. (2001). Mood as a resource in processing self-relevant information. In J. Forgas (Ed.), Handbook of affect and social cognition (pp. 256–274). Mahwah, NJ, US: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers.
Tsukamoto, S., & Fiske, S. (2018). Perceived threat to national values in evaluating stereotyped immigrants. The Journal of Social Psychology, 158, 157–172. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224545.2017.1317231.
Tsukamoto, S., Holland, E., Haslam, N., Karasawa, M., & Kashima, Y. (2015). Cultural differences in perceived coherence of the self and in-group: a Japan-Australia comparison. Asian Journal of Social Psychology, 18, 83–89. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajsp.12090.
Wang, S. Y. (2018). Seeing the good and bad in culture: An exploration of the construct of cultural complexity. (Unpublished doctoral dissertation), Indiana University, Bloomington.
Wohl, M. J. A., & Branscombe, N. R. (2005). Forgiveness and collective guilt assignment to historical perpetrator groups depend on level of social category inclusiveness. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 88, 288–303. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.88.2.288.
Wohl, M. J. A., Branscombe, N. R., & Klar, Y. (2006). Collective guilt: Emotional reactions when one’s group has done wrong or been wronged. European Review of Social Psychology, 17, 1–37. https://doi.org/10.1080/10463280600574815.
Zagefka, H., Pehrson, S., Mole, C. M., & Chan, E. (2010). The effect of essentialism in settings of historic intergroup atrocities. European Journal of Social Psychology, 40, 718–732. https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.639.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of Interest
The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
Ethical Statement
This research was approved by Arcadia University’s Institutional Review Board.
Additional information
Publisher’s Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Brown, C.M., Goto, N., Tsukamoto, S. et al. Understanding collective guilt: Tolerance for contradiction and state-trait dissociations in perceived overlap between ingroup members. Curr Psychol 41, 1534–1548 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-020-00684-6
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-020-00684-6