Sandra Penic, Guy Elcheroth, and Dario Spini — When Is Collective Exposure to War Events Related to More Acceptance of Collective Guilt?

28 published claims from this book.

• Asymmetric violence plus segregated contact plausibly drives rejection of collective guilt
• Asymmetric violence suppresses guilt while symmetric victimization of both groups raises it.
• Beliefs about collective victimization depend on exposure to narratives.
• Collective victimization typically suppresses acceptance of collective guilt
• Communal war exposure, not personal victimization, drives collective guilt acceptance
• Direct war victims rarely accept collective guilt for group atrocities.
• Directly experienced violence promotes collective guilt acceptance more than mediated narratives do.
• Economic deprivation, not asymmetric violence alone, drives guilt rejection.
• Event frequency in ACLED closely approximates victimization intensity despite equal event weighting.
• Event-level classification of violence distinguishes symmetric from sequential asymmetric victimization.
• Experiencing symmetric intergroup violence predicts greater acceptance of one’s group’s collective guilt.
• Former Yugoslav states differed sharply in which types of wartime violence their populations experienced.
• Group-level guilt acceptance does not track actual violence exposure directly
• Guilt acceptance is rooted in communal not national shared victimization.
• Guilt rejection is not an unavoidable reaction to collective victimization.
• Heavier regional war victimization raises acceptance of collective guilt.
• Low interethnic contact sustains rejection of collective guilt
• Members of victimized groups can still accept collective guilt for in-group harms.
• People exposed only to state-controlled victimhood narratives deny in-group responsibility
• Proximal war experience fosters critical knowledge that increases in-group accountability.
• Reluctance to accept guilt rises where wartime atrocities and economic hardship both occurred
• Spatially weighted multilevel modeling avoids unrealistic assumptions of independence between contextual units.
• Symmetric violence war zones retain intergroup friendship and helping acts.
• The findings are robust across different operationalizations of war-event indicators.
• TRACES surveyed a representative cohort of young-adult Yugoslavs in 2006.
• War exposure and victimization varied sharply across former Yugoslav republics.
• War guilt acceptance depends more on regional than personal exposure.
• Warfare in ethnically mixed Yugoslav regions took either conventional or genocidal forms.