Highly identified group members minimize collective guilt by morally reinterpreting ingroup wrongs

Evidence

Other investigators have looked at specific emotions in group contexts. For example, Doosje et al. (1998) investigated collective guilt, an emotion that people experience when they regard their ingroup as having morally transgressed in an important way. Notably, the research shows that the most highly identified group members may be the least likely to experience this emotion, because they are motivated to find ways to reinterpret events and evaluate the ingroup’s actions as morally acceptable. This finding indicates that experiencing emotions as a member of a group is not inevitable for an individual; people may seek to reinterpret or reappraise the situation, or even to disidentify with a group, if the resulting group-based emotion is unwelcome. — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 2278

According to other theoretical considerations, however, the relationship between strength of in-group identification and collective guilt should be negative (Doosje et al., 1998; Roccas et al., 2006). High (vs. low) identifiers should be more motivated to defend their group from threats to the group’s positive image. For die-hard group members, salient information about the in-group’s wrongdoings likely threaten core aspects of their social self. Doosje et al. (1998) argued that high identifiers will thus be reluctant to accept information on immoral actions of their group and that they will be most likely to develop defensive strategies aimed at re-interpreting threatening information and suppressing the experience of negative emotions like collective guilt (Leach et al., 2008, Study 7; McGarty & Bliuc, 2004). — Torsten Masson and Markus Barth, The identification-guilt paradox…, 21

In summary, the first step toward feeling collective guilt involves recognizing that one’s ingroup or specific members of one’s ingroup have engaged in behaviors that have had negative and unjustified consequences for members of another group. Recognizing the wrongdoing of one’s ingroup is often inhibited by the general tendency to make group-serving attributions especially if one is highly identified with an ingroup. We turn now to the interpretative process that takes place after recognizing that one’s group is at fault. Admitting that one’s ingroup has engaged in unjustifiably negative actions against an outgroup does not guarantee that people will feel a sense of collective guilt for those actions or be motivated to make reparations for them. Beyond this initial interpretation of the event’s relation to the ingroup, we believe that a further interpretation of the event occurs, an interpretation that defines the degree and quality of self-blame that people feel for the event. — Nyla R. Branscombe and Bertjan Doosje (eds.), Collective Guilt, 306

Categorization

• QUESTION: Counterintuitive mechanism worth chasing: identification normally predicts emotion, yet here it predicts suppression of an unwelcome group emotion.
• XREF: This is the defensive/threat-driven pole the reader contrasts against secure attachment in their glorification research — directly names the Roccas et al. lineage. — connects to: Identification relates to collective guilt along a nonlinear inverted-U curve. — Torsten Masson and Markus Barth, The identification-guilt paradox…, 15; In-group identification relates to collective guilt in a non-linear fashion. — Torsten Masson and Markus Barth, The identification-guilt paradox…, 25; Affective group attachment, not mere membership perception, drives non-linear responses to collective guilt — Torsten Masson and Markus Barth, The identification-guilt paradox…, 26 (+40 more)
• DEFINE: Maps the two-stage interpretive model (wrongdoing recognition, then self-blame appraisal) that frames where collective guilt originates.
• corroborated: 4 independent passages support this claim — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 2278; Torsten Masson and Markus Barth, The identification-guilt paradox…, 21; Nyla R. Branscombe and Bertjan Doosje (eds.), Collective Guilt: International…, 306