People threatened by their group’s moral failures deny, relabel, and relativize the facts

Evidence

The next day, however, I had to laugh at myself. I had reacted in precisely the same way in which participants in my studies do when information that threatens the image of the group to which they belong, particularly their moral status, is presented to them. Under these conditions, research has shown that we experience negative emotions such as guilt or shame, we feel outraged, we deny the very facts, or attempt to do so anyway, we re-conceptualize, we argue about labels, categories, and the meaning of the events, we try to put them in a different context, and we compare them with others and “worse” things that others have done (the others being, ideally, our very victims, or the group of whoever is presenting this information to us). I asked my girlfriend, “How dare you (an American) raise the issue of these teeny tiny camps when you have dropped atomic bombs over two cities?” — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 2084

Categorization

• XREF: Directly evidences the ingroup/outgroup moral-defense repertoire the reader is tracking; connects to Allport’s account of prejudice as ego-defense and to moral-disengagement mechanisms (Bandura being the canonical source). — connects to: Participants’ terse anti-apartheid statements read as perfunctory correctness. — Cornel Verwey and Michael Quayle, Whiteness, racism, and Afrikaner…, 148; People keep discredited beliefs when corrections leave no replacement explanation — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects…, 277; Anti-factual tactics normatively rebound hardest onto the vulnerable they were meant to protect — Lee McIntyre, Post-Truth, 295
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 2084