Gruesome truths can backfire as persuasion because people avoid them

Evidence

In retrospect, I think the Hoess confession misfired because it is so gruesome. Students may have avoided thinking about it for that reason, and so remained unmoved. Strong fear-arousing communications can do this (Insko, 1967). If so, it provides a final ironic injustice to the victims of the Holocaust. They, along with many other Nazi prisoners, were brutalized and murdered by the powerful forces in German society. These Nazis, because they were powerful and still influential, often escaped from Europe afterward, sometimes with the active help of Allied governments. Even those captured, tried, and convicted usually had their sentences commuted for reasons of political expediency as the Cold War developed. And now, people may not want to know the truth about the Holocaust precisely because it was so horrible. — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 3221

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The irony loop - victims brutalized by the powerful, perpetrators protected by Allied expediency, and now the horror itself makes people avoid the truth that would convict the perpetrators - is a dense, multi-layer claim about how atrocity testimony functions and fails.
• XREF: connects to: Motivated reasoning makes people reject information threatening their values and beliefs. — Anna Merlan, Republic of Lies, 89; People proactively avoid information that could trigger collective guilt. — Nyla R. Branscombe and Bertjan Doosje (eds.), Collective Guilt: International…, 454