The effect of essentialism in settings of historic intergroup atrocities

Three studies tested the effects of essentialist beliefs regarding the national ingroup in situations where a perpetrator group has inflicted harm on a victim group. For members of the perpetrator group, it was hypothesised that ‘essentialism’ has a direct positive association with ‘collective guilt’ felt as a result of misdeeds conducted by other ingroup members in the past. Simultaneously, it was hypothesised to have an indirect negative association with collective guilt, mediated by perceived threat to the ingroup. Considering these indirect and direct effects jointly, it was hypothesised that the negative indirect effect suppresses the direct positive effect, and that the latter would only emerge if perceived ‘ingroup threat’ was controlled for. This was tested in a survey conducted in Latvia among Russians (N1⁄4 70) and their feelings toward how Russians had treated ethnic Latvians during the Soviet occupation; and in a survey in Germany among Germans (N1⁄4 84), focussing on their feelings toward the Holocaust. For members of the victim group, it was hypothesised that essentialism would be associated with more anger and reluctance to forgive past events inflicted on other ingroup members. It was proposed that this effect would be mediated by feeling connected to the ingroup victims. This was tested in a survey conducted among Hong Kong Chinese and their feelings toward the Japanese and the Nanjing massacre (N1⁄4 56). Results from all three studies supported the hypotheses. Copyright # 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Group-based atrocities are all too common: the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide and the conflict in Sudan’s region of Darfur, to name but a few. After such events, the descendants of both perpetrators and victims face the task of coming to terms with the past. They can respond to such events, in which they are only implicated because of their group membership and in which they were not personally involved, in a number of ways. The present research highlights the importance of essentialist beliefs about the ingroup in determining what shape their responses take. The perpetrators’ children and grandchildren might feel vicarious guilt and accept some kind of ‘inherited’ responsibility, or they might instead decide that they have nothing to do with events in which they were not directly involved. Descendants of the perpetrator group can differ with regards to just how guilty they feel. Whether or not feelings of guilt will be present can have important implications, because feelings of guilt (or the lack thereof) have been linked to attitudes towards members of the victim group (Zimmermann, Abrams, & Eller, 2005), to the propensity to make an apology (Iyer, Leach, & Pedersen, 2004) and to attitudes towards affirmative action and other types of reparations to make good past wrongdoings (Barkan, 2000; Brown & Cehajic, 2008; Doosje, Branscombe, Spears, & Manstead, 1998; Lickel, lloway, University of London, Egham, TW20 0EX, UK. E-mail: [email protected] ummer institute at the Solomon Asch Center for the Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict (SACSEC) at Penn. s, Ltd. Received 17 October 2008 Accepted 19 March 2009 Essentialism in settings of historic intergroup atrocities 719 Schmader, & Barquissau, 2004; Swim & Miller, 1999; but see Harvey & Oswald, 2000). Because of this, studying predictors of collective guilt is not only of theoretical but also of applied importance. The victims’ children and grandchildren might still feel very angry about past events, or their anger might have dissipated. Theymight have forgiven the perpetrator group, or might still be very reluctant to forgive thewrongdoings. The levels of anger and forgiveness have, of course, important consequences for the quality of intergroup relations (Noor, Brown, & Prentice, 2008), and studying their predictors is therefore also of both academic and practical importance. We suggest that the emotional responses of members of both the perpetrator and victim groups will be shaped by the extent to which they see the ingroup as defined in essentialist terms. ESSENTIALIST BELIEFS ‘Once a bitch always a bitch’; this is what William Faulkner’s (1929) character of Jason says about Caddy, not because she engages in sexually deviant behaviour (not yet anyway, although she arguably does so later as a result of a self-fulfilling prophecy), but because her mother was purported to have done so. This illustrates nicely some important aspects of essentialism, namely a belief that certain characteristics are inherited and therefore must have a natural (genetic or other biological) basis, are unchangeable and stable and are informative, because one only needs to know about the character of one category member to be able to make meaningful inferences about the character of other category members. We would argue, as others have, that social research should avoid advancing primordial accounts of ethnic or national categories (Suny, 2001; Verkuyten, 2004). Nonetheless, we do see essentialist beliefs about group memberships to be an important object of study. Specifically, in this paper, we suggest that such beliefs are implicated in the way people relate to and feel about historic intergroup atrocities. In the psychological literature, essentialism has been conceptualised in various ways. Yzerbyt, Rocher, and Schadron (1997) define it as a belief that all members of a social category have an essential feature in common, that category memberships are immutable, that inferences about members of the category can be easily made, that features of category members can be interpreted in light of a unifying theme and that category membership is exclusive. For Medin (1989, see also Medin & Ortony, 1989), psychological essentialism is a belief that things have essences or underlying natures that make them what they are. Similarly, Rothbart and Taylor (1992) and Hirschfeld (1996) argue that social categories are often treated as if they were natural kinds. They are assumed to be discrete, homogeneous with deep inherent intra-category similarities, mutually exclusive, unalterable and to have and rich inductive potential. A major area of discussion in the literature has concerned the relationship between essentialism and entitativity. Haslam, Rothschild, and Ernst (2000, 2002) see entitativity as one dimension of essentialism, with natural kinds as another. For Kashima and colleagues (2005), essentialism is a component of entitativity. Others propose that essentialist beliefs are distinct from (Yzerbyt, Corneille, & Estrada, 2001; Yzerbyt, Estrada, Corneille, Seron, & Demoulin, 2004; Yzerbyt & Rogier, 2001) and predicted by (Demoulin, Leyens, & Yzerbyt, 2006) the natural kinds and entitativity dimensions. Denson, Lickel, Curtis, Stenstrom, and Ames (2006), meanwhile, use the term ‘essentialism’ to refer only to beliefs about natural kinds with strong biological connotations and not to beliefs about entitativity. Like Denson et al. (2006), we employ the term ‘essentialism’ to refer to beliefs about natural kinds. We are interested in the biological component of psychological essentialism, as expressed in lay theories of genetic determinism (for a similar focus, see Keller, 2005). Further, we are interested in such beliefs applied to nationality. Ethnic representations of nationality, whereby national groups are defined in terms of a supposed shared ancestral origin, are a particular case of essentialism (Pehrson, Brown, & Zagefka, 2009). Ethnic nationalism presents national group membership as something immutable, given by nature, and based on quasi-biological connections between members of the national group (Connor, 1994; Smith, 2001). Membership of ethnically defined national categories can be obtained only by birth, and the symbolism of shared ‘blood’ is often important (Ignatieff, 1993). In other words, by ‘essentialism’ we mean a belief that membership of a national category as well as the nature and character of this category are determined by biological, genetic and hereditary factors. Substantially, it is a belief in the triumph of nature over nurture; it is the belief that group membership is ‘written in the blood’, and that the ingroup’s ‘essence’ which defines its character is passed on through some unspecified biological or genetic process. It is this particular case Copyright # 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Eur. J. Soc. Psychol. 40, 718–732 (2010)