The lay historian explains intergroup behavior: Examining the role of identification and cognitive structuring in ethnocentric historical attributions

Abstract

Both historians and lay people attempt to explain national histories. However, psychological research, to date, focused predominantly on the patterns of those explanations with regard to negative historical behaviors. In this article, we assess ethnocentrism of people’s explanations of both negative and positive historical behavior of ingroup members (own nation) and outgroup members (other nation). Two studies analyze how Poles explain crimes and heroic acts committed in the General Government, as well as diverse behaviors during the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. The studies confirm an ethnocentric pattern of explanation: positive historical actions of ingroup members were explained more dispositionally than positive actions of outgroup members—negative historical actions of ingroup members were explained less dispositionally than negative historical actions of outgroup members. Furthermore, we found that this effect is more pronounced among individuals who highly identify with their nation. Apart from the influence of the strength of ingroup identification, we found that people who cling to structured knowledge (i.e. a high ability to achieve cognitive closure) tend to explain well-established historical facts (e.g. the Holocaust) but not little known facts (e.g. intervention in Czechoslovakia) in a more ethnocentric way.