Abstract
The present work examines the acknowledgment of past ingroup victimization by adversary outgroup leaders as an effective means to promote intergroup trust. More specifically, through an experimental study we demonstrated that Israeli-Jewish participants who were exposed to Palestinian leaders’ messages acknowledging the Jews’ suffering from anti-Semitic persecutions (past victimization condition) displayed more trust toward outgroup leaders than participants who were exposed to messages acknowledging the Jews’ sufferings from the ongoing conflict (present victimization condition) and participants who were exposed to a control message condition. Further, trust mediated the relationship between acknowledgment of past victimization by rivals and forgiveness toward the outgroup as a whole. The implications of these results for restoring fractured intergroup relations are discussed.
Highlights
Intractable conflicts are conceived as protracted conflicts that are perceived by both parts as unsolvable and of zero-sum nature
Those who were assigned to the condition of acknowledgment of past victimization perceived the message as focusing more on the present-day Jews’ sufferings than those who were assigned to the control condition, p =
Bonferroni-adjusted pairwise comparisons revealed that respondents who were exposed to the message that acknowledged the past victimization displayed higher levels of trust toward outgroup leaders (M = 3.58, SD = 1.81) than respondents who were exposed to the message that acknowledged the present victimization (M = 2.61, SD = 1.79), p = .04, or assigned to the control condition (M = 2.59, SD = 1.54), p =
Summary
Intractable conflicts are conceived as protracted conflicts that are perceived by both parts as unsolvable and of zero-sum nature. Literature on reconciliation has consistently demonstrated that the symbolic acknowledgement of the rivals’ sufferings due to the ongoing conflict is important to restore conflictual relations Acknowledging these sufferings is especially difficult in intractable conflicts, as both the involved parties tend to compete over which group is suffering more. This acknowledgment could not necessarily focus only on the present-day conflict and focus on sufferings belonging to the group’s collective memories. Volkan (2001) argued that in virtually every large group there exists a mental representation of a central traumatizing past event which is called the group’s ‘chosen trauma’ It represents a key component of the collective identity and deeply shapes the group members’ behaviors and their perceptions during the times of conflict. The main goal of the present study is to explore whether for group members (i.e., Israeli-Jews) the acknowledgment by rival representatives (i.e., Palestinian leaders) of this chosen trauma (i.e., anti-Semitic persecutions) would be a means for promoting trust and increasing the likelihood of enduring reconciliation even more effectively than the acknowledgment of the sufferings due to the ongoing conflict
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