Dealing with Ingroup Committed Atrocities: Moral Responsibility and Group-Based Guilt

Abstract

In this chapter, I address two questions. First, I discuss the question of how people face the knowledge that their ingroup fellows have committed grave harm towards other groups. Through providing a brief empirical overview of the above question, I argue that acknowledgment of ingroup responsibility should be regarded as an important social, psychological, and political process for sustainable intergroup reconciliation (see Bar-Tal, Intractable conflicts: psychological foundations and dynamics, 2013 on peacebuilding processes). In the second part of this chapter, I discuss and analyze the relationship between two psychological processes, which might arise as a consequence of acknowledgment of ingroup responsibility. Those are personal acceptance of ingroup responsibility (as a moral response) and group-based guilt (as an emotional response). I discuss the relationship between these two constructs, not only in the light of empirical evidence from a post-conflict context in Bosnia and Herzegovina, but also using the theoretical framework on societal beliefs as proposed by Bar-Tal (2000).