A group’s dominant emotion can shift from shame to guilt across generations

Evidence

It is not necessarily the case that a given negative group history will evoke the same emotion in its members across time. It is conceivable that group members could tend to experience shame upon initial public exposure of “dirty deeds,” but then in a later historical period the primary emotional response might change to guilt when moral responsibility for permitting those acts to occur are accepted. For example, among Germans, initially following their defeat and surrender to the Allied Forces at the end of World War II when the Nazi’s actions were revealed to all during the Nuremberg trials, shame may have been the primary emotional response among the citizenry. At that time, the emphasis may have been on how members of their own government had placed them in this publicly weakened and helpless position. Accordingly, collective shame might be most strongly felt among those alive during the “unmasking period,” but collective guilt might be more likely among subsequent generations who have accepted moral responsibility for their nation’s harm doing (see Rensmann, this volume, Chapter 10). — Nyla R. Branscombe and Bertjan Doosje (eds.), Collective Guilt, 225

It is not necessarily the case that a given negative group history will evoke the same emotion in its members across time. It is conceivable that group members could tend to experience shame upon initial public exposure of “dirty deeds,” but then in a later historical period the primary emotional response might change to guilt when moral responsibility for permitting those acts to occur are accepted. For example, among Germans, initially following their defeat and surrender to the Allied Forces at the end of World War II when the Nazi’s actions were revealed to all during the Nuremberg trials, shame may have been the primary emotional response among the citizenry. At that time, the emphasis may have been on how members of their own government had placed them in this publicly weakened and helpless position. Accordingly, collective shame might be most strongly felt among those alive during the “unmasking period,” but collective guilt might be more likely among subsequent generations who have accepted moral responsibility for their nation’s harm doing (see Rensmann, this volume, Chapter 10). — Nyla R. Branscombe and Bertjan Doosje (eds.), Collective Guilt, 225

Categorization

• QUESTION: This suggests a testable generational arc: shame among those alive at unmasking, guilt among later cohorts who accept moral responsibility. Does the empirical German data support this sequence?
• SEED: A potential essay angle: what transition points move a society from victimized self-perception (shame) to accountable self-perception (guilt), and could institutions deliberately accelerate this?
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Nyla R. Branscombe and Bertjan Doosje (eds.), Collective Guilt: International…, 225
• XREF: connects to: Anti-semitic resentment declines steadily across German postwar generations — Nyla R. Branscombe and Bertjan Doosje (eds.), Collective Guilt: International…, 1194