Michael T. Schmitt, Daniel A. Miller, Nyla R. Branscombe, and Jack W. Brehm — The Difficulty of Making Reparations Affects the Intensity of Collective Guilt

21 published claims from this book.

• Collective guilt peaks at moderate rather than low or high reparation difficulty
• Contradictory ideologies that assert change is either trivial or impossible both suppress collective guilt
• Emotional intensity rises then falls as deterrents increase.
• Emotional intensity rises to a maximum set by function importance when deterrents are unknown.
• Emotions adaptively mobilize attention, behavior hierarchies, and physiology to respond to environmental demands.
• Emotions function as motivational drives that organize behavior toward valued outcomes.
• Group members feel guilt by association without personal responsibility for the harm.
• Guilt works as motivation whose intensity tracks the cost of required action.
• Illegitimacy perception is necessary but not sufficient to drive guilt intensity variation.
• Known deterrents produce non-monotonic emotional intensity peaking at function importance.
• Low-guilt states mask opposite potentials for future guilt escalation under new deterrents.
• Men randomly assigned to four reparations-difficulty conditions
• Rejecting whole-group accountability is a way people avoid collective guilt
• Reparation difficulty was experimentally manipulated without eliciting actual commitment.
• Reparation difficulty was manipulated by varying required signature counts of 5, 50, or 100.
• Reparation-difficulty levels were calibrated from a pretest of men’s willingness.
• Self-categorization at group level makes members feel ingroup wrongdoings as their own.
• Self-reported guilt is underestimated because guilt implicates one’s own ingroup.
• Social-identity and privilege threats also deter collective guilt beyond reparation costs.
• The perceived cost of reparations functions as a rhetorical deterrent to feeling guilt
• The reparation-difficulty effect is specific to guilt, not other emotions.