“Historia est magistra vitae”? The impact of historical victimhood on current conspiracy beliefs

Conspiracy beliefs constitute a propensity to attribute major events to powerful agents acting against less powerful “victims”. In this article we test whether collective victimhood facilitates conspiracy thinking. Study 1 showed that perceived group victimhood is associated with generic and group-specific conspiracy beliefs, but only for individuals who identify highly with their ingroup. Study 2 employed an experimental design to show that experimentally increased group victimhood leads to increased endorsement of conspiracy beliefs among high ingroup identifiers, but decreases endorsement of conspiracy beliefs among low identifiers. This effect was mediated by lack of trust towards outgroup members. Study 3 sought to replicate Study 2 in a different socio-political context. While Study 3 did not directly support the relationship between victimhood, group identification and conspiracy beliefs, an integrated meta-analysis of all three studies provides evidence for a significant interaction of victimhood and group identification in predicting conspiracy beliefs.

The Ethics of Researching and Writing About Collective Victimhood in Postconflict Societies

This chapter examines ethical questions involved in researching collective victimhood in postconflict settings, where the violence is very recent or still ongoing. Drawing on her field work experience in Rwanda, Zanzibar, and Sudan, the author discusses challenges such as trauma and politicized victim narratives that can result in participants’ unwillingness to talk, researchers being mistaken for therapists, and risks for researchers and participants in discussing politically sensitive topics. Other challenges include researchers becoming biased toward the silenced, nonhegemonic narrative; the difficulty of collecting information on group membership; and participants’ responses being influenced by the perceived group membership of the researchers. Additionally, findings on collective victimization can be misused for political purposes, and researchers carry additional responsibly to assess and navigate these risks in their research, writing, and dissemination. Researchers studying collective victimization need to focus on their participants’ interests and well-being and ensure that the costs for participants are not too high.

The Social Psychology of Collective Victimhood

This book provides an overview of current social psychological scholarship on collective victimhood. Drawing on different contexts of collective victimization—such as those due to genocide, war, ethnic or religious conflict, racism, colonization, Islamophobia, the caste system, and other forms of direct and structural collective violence—this edited volume presents theoretical ideas and empirical findings concerning the psychological experience of being targeted by collective violence in the past or present. Specifically, the book addresses questions such as: How are experiences of collective victimization passed down in groups and understood by those who did not experience the violence personally? How do people cope with and make sense of collective victimization of their group? How do the different perceptions of collective victimization feed into positive versus hostile relations with other groups? How does group-based power shape these processes? Who is included in or excluded from the category of “victims,” and what are the psychological consequences of such denial versus acknowledgment? Which individual psychological processes such as needs or personality traits shape people’s responses to collective victimization? What are the ethical challenges of researching collective victimization, especially when these experiences are recent and/or politically contested? This edited volume offers different theoretical perspectives on these questions and shows the importance of examining both individual and structural influences on the psychological experience of collective victimhood—including attention to power structures, history, and other aspects of the social and political context that help explain the diversity in experiences of and responses to collective victimization.

The Tendency to Feel Victimized in Interpersonal and Intergroup Relationships

This chapter discusses individual differences in the tendency to perceive interpersonal victimhood, and parallels to collective victimhood. Specifically, some people are more likely than others to perceive victimization on the interpersonal level, experience it more intensely, and incorporate these experiences into their identity. The tendency to perceive (interpersonal) victimhood consists of four dimensions: a need for recognition of suffering, perceived moral superiority, lack of empathy for others’ suffering, and rumination over negative feelings and thoughts related to experienced offenses. People who score higher on these dimensions show greater biases in their interpretation, memory, and attributions of interpersonal transgressions: They recall them more, perceive them as more severe, expect more to be harmed by others, and perceive more harm in ambiguous situations. They are also less willing to forgive transgressions. The authors compare this with parallel findings on intergroup relations in the context of collective violence, arguing that similar processes operate.

A Critical Race Reading of Collective Victimhood

This chapter examines the cultural psychological processes that contribute to the delegitimization of Black victimhood in the United States. Drawing on a critical race psychology perspective that focuses on societal processes through which racism is maintained and reproduced, the authors examine the precariousness of claims of Black victimhood in the United States. The same mechanisms that maintain racist structures also delegitimize and deny Black victimhood. These processes include individualism and color-blind ideologies, victim blaming, the misrepresentation and dehumanization of Black victims, the assumption of White innocence and Whites’ moral disengagement from responsibility for racism, and claims of victimhood among Whites, especially in response to perceived threats of gains among minority groups. Thus, collective victimhood becomes precarious for Black Americans in that it is used as a tool of further oppression by others, instead of a source of support from third parties. The “benefits” of collective victimhood are not afforded to all groups.

Introduction to The Social Psychology of Collective Victimhood

This chapter introduces the volume and gives a brief overview of its structure and the content of each chapter. The chapter describes the nature of social psychological research on collective victimhood to date, defines the concept, and provides an organizing framework for scholarship on collective victimhood. This framework emphasizes the interplay of structural and individual-level factors that need to be considered, as well as how the social psychology of collective victimhood is studied at the micro-, meso-, and macro level of analysis. In order to avoid a determinist and simplistic view of collective victimhood, it is crucial to consider the different ways in which people actively construe and make sense of collective victimization of their group(s). It is also important to consider the role of power, history, and other structural factors that together shape the diversity of experiences of collective victimization as well as the consequences of collective victimhood.

Collective Victimhood Resulting From Structural Violence

This chapter discusses collective victimization resulting from structural violence, and how the effects of inequality can have similar deleterious consequences for peoples’ ability to meet basic needs. Social class and structural violence have been underexamined so far in the literature on collective victimhood. However, considering collective victim beliefs due to structural violence—which are related to, but distinct from relative deprivation—enriches our understanding of relevant experiences and extends the collective victim beliefs that should be assessed. The authors show with empirical examples from Italy and South Africa that collective victim beliefs about structural violence are distinct from collective victim beliefs about direct violence. They also reveal that collective victim beliefs about structural violence may predict different outcomes, such as the preference for different forms of acknowledgment or the need for empowerment and acceptance.

Community Members’ Theorization of Their Collective Victimization

Focusing on Muslims in Europe and in the United States, this chapter examines collective influences on individual theorizing about collective victimization more generally, and Islamophobia specifically. The authors argue that the theorization of collective victimhood is a topic of debate within communities, involving arguments about the breadth and inclusivity of the community and the meaning of culturally shared and identity-relevant narratives. For example, the authors explore how arguments as to how Muslims should make sense of their experience of victimization draw on different interpretations of Qur’anic text. Throughout, the authors discuss the two-way relationship between constructions of victimhood and individual experience, and how different ways of theorizing intergroup relations result in different understandings of the nature of group members’ victimization and how they should respond. The authors’ approach highlights the importance of a contextualized, culturally embedded analysis of how collective victimhood is understood and theorized.