Nyla R. Branscombe and Bertjan Doosje (eds.) — Collective Guilt: International Perspectives

220 published claims from this book.

• A group’s dominant emotion can shift from shame to guilt across generations
• Accepting collective guilt can motivate building a more inclusive moral identity.
• Accepting collective responsibility makes both assigning and accepting guilt feasible.
• Acknowledging collective misdeeds only motivates repair when guilt, not shame, is evoked.
• Acknowledging group privilege triggers guilt that motivates reparative policy support
• Active conflict makes apologies self-defeating for those who offer them.
• Admitting group immorality is easier when it does not reflect on the group today
• Adopting the perpetrator’s perspective reverses which identifiers feel most guilty
• Advantaged groups avoid guilt by denying inequality or dodging responsibility
• Advantaged groups deploy four distinct strategies toward reparative action
• Ambiguity in harm perceptions lets dominant groups minimize inequality and ease their collective guilt.
• Amidst guilt feelings, Germans attribute the guilt demand to a hostile outside world
• An event’s personal self-implication, not group blame itself, determines which emotion arises.
• Anti-semitic resentment declines steadily across German postwar generations
• Apologies feel more appropriate than money for repairing irreplaceable historical harms
• Apologies only partially restore equity and do more to assuage guilt than privilege.
• Apologies relieve low identifiers but threaten high identifiers’ group image
• Australian results partly reflect widely rehearsed public guilt-and-apology arguments
• Believing gender equality is possible but too costly suppresses men’s collective guilt.
• Believing in equal opportunity lets advantaged groups justify status inequality and avoid collective guilt.
• Broad national identification measures fail to predict collective guilt reliably
• Categorizing at a broader level diffuses responsibility and lowers collective guilt
• Civil-rights laws reduced blatant racism but left subtler discrimination intact
• Claims that apologies create legal liability are refuted by existing apologies
• Collective blame drives vicarious retribution spirals that escalate intergroup conflict.
• Collective blame toward groups tracks perceived interdependence with wrongdoers, via commission and omission inferences.
• Collective guilt acceptance and assignment rest on different psychological conditions.
• Collective guilt acceptance is a validated measure mediating inequality salience and reparations
• Collective guilt and collective shame are distinct reactions with different appraisal triggers
• Collective guilt and shame drive conflict-attenuating behaviors, not just inner feelings.
• Collective guilt assignment is uncorrelated with personal guilt
• Collective guilt can be functional by motivating reparative action
• Collective guilt can occur without any personal responsibility for the harm
• Collective guilt can spur creating new just relationships, not only compensating past wrongs
• Collective guilt causally links attitudes to political behavior rather than being epiphenomenal
• Collective guilt correlates strongly with perceived reparation obligations toward Indigenous Australians
• Collective guilt depends on identification with relevant subgroups, not the nation as a whole.
• Collective guilt extends to ongoing inequality one benefits from, not just past harms
• Collective guilt follows an inverted-U curve peaking when reparations require moderate effort.
• Collective guilt follows unrepentant perceived wrongdoing and motivates repair
• Collective guilt functions adaptively by motivating reparation and preventing repeated intergroup conflict
• Collective guilt intensity is set by motivation deterred by reparation cost.
• Collective guilt is a separate construct from personal guilt
• Collective guilt is contested through ideological debate between privileged and disadvantaged groups.
• Collective guilt is distress over ingroup immorality without legal responsibility
• Collective guilt is felt when the self’s group illegitimately harmed another group
• Collective guilt items need only a salient group referent, not specific wording
• Collective guilt mediates perception of past wrongdoing and later apology support
• Collective guilt mediates the link between perceived injustice and policy endorsement.
• Collective guilt motivates intergroup change only under favorable conditions.
• Collective guilt motivates repair and compensation just as personal guilt does
• Collective guilt over past harms becomes discussable only long after the events
• Collective guilt predicts reparative motivation while collective shame predicts distancing.
• Collective guilt reporting is not driven by social desirability or self-esteem bias
• Collective guilt requires group membership recognition plus perceived group responsibility for a humanitarian violation.
• Collective guilt serves intergroup relations better than collective shame does.
• Collective guilt should track strong identification but actually tracks weak identification
• Collective responsibility is contested when present members lack ancestral connection to past harm
• Confronting national guilt openly fosters rather than hinders democratization
• Cooperation the powerful see as benevolent is read as degrading dependency by the weak.
• Defensive Germans superficially accept guilt while warding off latent responsibility
• Demanding too much or too little both suppress dominant-group guilt.
• Denying collective guilt provokes more affect than denying personal guilt
• Disadvantaged groups convert inequity distress into anger, not guilt.
• Distancing from a wrongdoer is a collectivity strategy linked particularly to shame.
• Distrusting adversaries should build trust before attempting past-focused apologies.
• Double victimhood narratives make reconciliation via apology near-impossible.
• Egalitarian gender relations threaten men’s privileged position and deter collective guilt
• Emotional intensity follows an inverted-U curve as deterrents grow
• Emotional intensity is capped by the subjective importance of the emotion’s function.
• Empathy manipulations can reliably induce perpetrator perspective-taking in experiments
• Equity theory organizes how perceived inequity becomes collective guilt and reparative action.
• Equity theory organizes the untested link between inequity and reparations
• Essentialized ingroup memberships channel blameworthy acts into image threat and shame
• Explaining social action requires studying opinion-group identification, not national identification
• Families are seen as interdependent and essential, friends interdependent, ethnic groups essential.
• Financial restitution demands backfire while apology demands succeed in eliciting reparations
• Forgiving perpetrators can feel like betraying the dead to survivors
• Gender equality threatens men’s identity by eliminating status difference
• Gender groups validate the distinction between assigning and accepting collective guilt.
• Gender inequality is the most pervasive and oldest form of group-based inequality.
• German rightists, not leftists, first promoted the idea of collective guilt
• Government-led reconciliation action matches imperfectly the group that caused historical harm
• Greater prejudice predicts lower collective guilt via justifiability construals
• Group apologies create shared ground for discussing negative history
• Group identification centrally involves positive affective commitment beyond cognitive self-inclusion
• Group members legitimize their ingroup’s harmful actions to avoid guilt
• Group members’ responses to threats to group image depend on how strongly they identify
• Group privilege operates as an undetected benefit until inequity is made salient
• Group source credibility determines whether high identifiers accept versus dismiss negative ingroup history.
• Group status determines whether advantage or disadvantage thoughts produce distress
• Group-protective self-interest biases fairness judgments and suppresses collective guilt among the highly identified
• Groups that self-stereotype as fair feel stronger pressure toward reparations.
• Guilt can be felt for one’s group’s moral violations without personal responsibility
• Guilt differences between high and low identifiers emerge only on ambiguous history
• Guilt is deeply unpleasant because it threatens one’s self-image as good
• Guilt is maximized when reparation costs are moderate or uncertain.
• Guilt motivates prosocial behaviors that mend damaged relationships.
• Guilt must be studied as an emotional experience, not merely a responsibility judgment
• Guilt requires holding internalized personal norms of justice, not external pressure
• Guilt requires perceived control while shame arises from uncontrollable exposure
• Guilt signals damaged relationships and motivates apology and repair.
• Guilt stems from bad behavior while shame stems from a flawed self
• High group identification alone need not produce ingroup bias or discrimination
• High group identifiers weigh ingroup costs of reparations more heavily than low identifiers.
• High identification amplifies whichever norms, fair or biased, the group holds
• High identifiers experience more collective guilt when reparation importance outweighs perceived costs.
• High national identification blocks acceptance of the group’s immoral history; low attachment enables it.
• High national identification requires a source of collective pride
• High social identification increases conformity to group norms through shared feeling and thinking
• Identification measures conflate salience with stable traits
• Identification mode shapes whether ingroup versus outgroup criticism triggers collective guilt
• Identity salience is dynamic and context-responsive while identification is stable
• Illegitimacy of group inequality is a necessary precondition for collective guilt.
• Imagining the perpetrator’s viewpoint raises guilt only in low identifiers
• Ingroup identification reduces collective guilt only when group history is ambiguous.
• Institutional apologies can deploy advantageous comparison to self-cast as victims
• Intergroup apologies can make relations worse without preexisting trust.
• Internal reconciliation forces a subgroup to act through superordinate institutions it dominates
• Israeli-Palestinian double victimhood blocks viable socio-emotional reconciliation.
• Legal and moral guilt cannot be inherited, but inherited group guilt feelings can
• Low identifiers more willingly address their group’s colonial past
• Lower group identification predicts more collective guilt and stronger reparation advocacy
• Lower national identification predicts more collective guilt and reparation support; higher identification predicts less.
• Many white Australians believe they are more disadvantaged than Indigenous peoples
• Measurement instrument choice drastically changes forgiveness findings
• Men feel most collective guilt when reparations are moderately difficult.
• Mere ingroup membership biases members to deny their group’s causal role in harm
• Mere membership in a perpetrating society can cause shameful identity without personal guilt
• Mild group identifiers feel guilty when harm is distant and done by others
• Modern western wrongdoing maps onto utilitarian harm to others
• Monetary compensation without apology fails victims seeking recognition
• Moral outrage motivating reparation does not require perceived ingroup responsibility.
• Motivational intensity rises and falls nonlinearly with task difficulty.
• Multiple expiation routes make collective guilt’s consequences nonlinear and complex
• Naming-and-shaming policy fails when shame breeds no guilt or reparation
• Nation-level reconciliation actions can follow from collective guilt
• National guilt and collective guilt are distinct concepts
• National identification crucially shapes perpetrators’ emotional responses to their group’s misdeeds.
• National identification is bound up with positive appraisals of the group’s history
• National identification’s implicit, pervasive nature predicts responses to historical group actions.
• Neither blanket reparations nor refusing action can alone restore racial equity
• Never forget the past psychologically means never forget we differ from other groups
• Objectively powerful groups claim victim status by merging current and past enemies
• Official apologies for past wrongs have not triggered legal liability in practice.
• Ongoing conflict frames ingroup guilt as unaffordable luxury and betrayal
• Ongoing historical harms trigger defensive denial where ended ones allow acknowledgment
• Opinion-based groups convert broad ideologies into collective action
• Opponents framed Indigenous Australians as overcompensated welfare recipients
• Outcome focus determines whether advantaged groups feel guilt or sympathy.
• Outgroup disapproval yields low guilt in high identifiers, while ingroup self-criticism reverses this
• Over-reward produces guilt while under-reward produces anger
• Participation itself changes participants’ self-conceptions before any external victory
• People are capable of feeling collective guilt for their groups’ wrongs
• People feel guilt by association for ancestors’ deeds without direct responsibility
• People proactively avoid information that could trigger collective guilt.
• People supporting apology often deny collective guilt and responsibility
• People treat personal apology acts like signing a Sorry Book as collective action
• Perceived feasibility explains which historical harms are actually repaired
• Perceived group inequity motivates distress that drives restorative action
• Perceived group responsibility for inequity produces collective guilt
• Perceived illegitimacy and instability of status drives intergroup hostility
• Perceived illegitimacy of advantage triggers dominant-group hostility
• Perceived justification of ingroup harm blocks collective guilt regardless of harm severity
• Perceived reparations importance depends on judged harm severity and violated moral value.
• Perceiving a group’s wrongdoing as situationally justifiable blocks collective guilt
• Perceiving interdependence with a wrongdoer triggers control appraisals that evoke guilt.
• Perceiving victims and perpetrators as one human group lowers guilt assignment.
• Perpetrator and victim groups favor accepting versus assigning guilt
• Perpetrator-group members can benefit from crimes without committing them
• Perpetrator-group victimhood recognition requires a two-generation time lag
• Personal guilt arises from internal attributions for controllable harmful outcomes
• Perspective-taking shifts perceived similarity only among low group identifiers
• Perspective-taking with victims makes strong identifiers deny uniformity of wrongdoing
• Political liberals accept more collective guilt than conservatives, independent of individual-responsibility beliefs.
• Post-1964 racial discrimination persists in subtler forms as laws are overturned
• Powerful groups need empathy while weaker groups need responsibility acceptance.
• Predicted guilt correlates with onset control and shame correlates with self-image threat.
• Prejudiced individuals commonly report compunction alongside their expressed prejudice
• Present control over racism’s ongoing effects can cause guilt over past slavery
• Privileged anti-racism activists weaponize their own privilege against the system
• Psychological equity restoration can shift blame onto disadvantaged groups and motivate counter-restoration
• Public shaming campaigns may backfire by evoking shame instead of guilt
• Reconciliation demands rehumanizing perpetrators, which ingroup norms punish
• Reminders of a group’s own victimization history increase guilt assigned to others
• Reminding a victimized group of old harms raises guilt assigned to a new enemy.
• Reparations advocacy must tie social change to the dominant group’s cherished values.
• Reparations raise perpetrator groups’ moral standing and reduce intergroup tension
• Rights are exercised through group membership like citizenship, not universal humanity
• Self-conscious emotions require self-report since they lack distinct physiological markers
• Self-reported nonprejudice is often doubted by social psychologists
• Shared superordinate identity is neither necessary nor sufficient for intergroup tolerance
• Shifting categorization level changes whether the same person counts as ingroup or outgroup.
• Social identity variables affect collective guilt only through perceived responsibility, legitimacy, and justice costs
• Societies endorse collective pride while rejecting collective guilt
• South Africa’s TRC traded amnesty for truth, not remorse or atonement
• Strong group identification distorts even objective perception of ingroup wrongdoing
• Strongest ingroup identifiers are least likely to feel collective guilt
• Strongly identified group members resist collective guilt more than weakly identified ones.
• Sympathy and moral outrage mobilize reparative action better than guilt does
• Taking another group’s perspective activates self-concept and increases perceived self-other overlap
• The Goldhagen controversy actually debated German national self-concept
• The identification-to-guilt causal direction may actually run in reverse
• The ingroup’s own suffering suppresses guilt even when it sees itself as responsible
• The source of disapproval reverses who feels most collective guilt
• The source trumping content of information can shift national guilt
• The word choice ‘regret’ avoids guilt where ‘sorry’ would not
• Those who read unfavorable group history become less willing to apologize
• Threatened group members either reinterpret history or revise their group’s image
• Type of ingroup association moderates whether collective guilt or shame is evoked
• Victimization-history reminders shift perceivers toward more exclusive categorization
• Victims may reject reparation offers that implicitly demand closure of their suffering
• When glory-based pride fails, high identifiers shift to humanitarian self-stereotypes
• Whether couples reunite or divorce dictates whether past pain must be confronted.
• Whether shared ideologies raise or lower guilt depends on how they are deployed.
• White Americans show little support for slavery reparations
• White privilege manifests as invisible everyday advantages that sustain racial disparity
• White privilege stays invisible because Whites rarely occupy divergent perspectives
• Whites feeling collective guilt may attempt actual compensation or partial reparation to restore equity
• Widely shared collective guilt has produced formal apologies and reparations