Intergroup Sentiments, Political Identity, and Their Influence on Responses to Potentially Ameliorative Proposals in the Context of an Intractable Conflict

Two studies examined the association of particular sentiments and political identities with Jewish-Israeli students’ responses to a generic plan to end the Israeli– Palestinian conflict and to narrower proposals for cooperative undertakings. Three composites—hatred/anger, compassion/empathy (reverse-coded), and guilt/shame (reverse-coded), and also a global composite combining these three sets of sentiments, were generally associated with negative responses to those plans and negative attributions about the wisdom and patriotism of supporters of those plans. Most of the associations between the global sentiments composite and the relevant responses continued to be statistically significant even after controlling for participants’ political identity. The interaction between the relevant sentiments and the putative authorship of one of the proposals was also investigated. Issues of generalizability, replicability, robustness, and of the relevance of mediational analysis, as well Arison School of Business, The Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, Israel School of Psychology, The Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, Israel Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA Corresponding Author: Dennis T. Kahn, Arison School of Business, Interdisciplinary Center, P.O.B. 167, Herzliya, Israel. Email: [email protected] Journal of Conflict Resolution 1-28 a The Author(s) 2014 Reprints and permission: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0022002714535250 jcr.sagepub.com at Interdisciplinary Center for on May 25, 2014 jcr.sagepub.com Downloaded from as implications for conflict resolution and potential directions for future research are addressed in a concluding discussion.