Highly identified group members resist feeling collective guilt by reinterpreting events

Evidence

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. — John F. Dovidio, Peter Glick, Laurie A. Rudman, On the Nature of Prejudice, 2278

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to defensive reappraisal and motivated reasoning literatures; also echoes moral disengagement mechanisms in Bandura. — 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 (+18 more)