Group membership makes collective moral failures threaten personal self-esteem.

Evidence

The fact that I felt badly and reacted defensively to the information threatening the moral image of my national group is because part of my sense of self is linked to the image of the groups to which I belong. In other words, my self-esteem is not only contingent upon my success and failures as an individual. The emotions that I experience are not caused solely by events that impact me as an individual. They both also depend on the vicissitudes and standing of the social groups to which I belong. — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 2088

Categorization

• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 2088
• XREF: connects to: Members of advantaged groups feel moral conflict when their superiority seems illegitimate. — Nurit Shnabel and Johannes Ullrich, Identity Needs in Intergroup Relations:…, 52