Everybody hurts (sometimes): The role of victim category accessibility in prosocial responses towards victimized outgroups.

Collective victimization can lead to competitiveness and reduced willingness to act on behalf of other victimized groups, but in some cases increases prosocial responses. We propose the concept of victim category accessibility (VCA) as one explanation for different reactions to victimization. Assuming that 'victims' is one among many categories into which individuals classify themselves and others, high VCA should increase the common categorization of ingroup and outgroup members as victims and increase prosocial responses towards victimized outgroups. Conversely, low VCA should increase the difficulty of identifying commonalities between ingroup and outgroup victims and reduce prosocial responses. In three studies, we develop a novel measure of VCA based on the Indirect Category Accessibility Task and demonstrate its association with willingness to act on behalf of victimized outgroups, but not ingroup members, beyond self-reported beliefs about victimization. The findings suggest a key role for VCA in understanding prosocial responses towards victimized outgroups.

High-Quality Contact With Fellow Majority Group Students Is Associated With Better Academic Performance of Minority Group Students.

We examined the association between intergroup contact and academic performance at university among minority students in a context with a segregated pre-university school system. Study 1 tested whether participation in a group dynamics course, which involves intimate interpersonal contact between Israeli Arab (n = 125) and Jewish students, was associated with better grade point average (GPA). As expected, Arab students who participated in the course had a higher GPA than those who did not, even when controlling for pre-university achievements. The corresponding difference among Jews was substantially smaller. Study 2 (N = 90), a longitudinal study, revealed that the quality of contact with Jewish students at university was associated with Arab students' subsequent higher GPA, even when controlling for pre-university contact, proxies of academic achievements, and perceptions of intergroup relations. The quality of contact with Jewish students was also associated with Arab students' sense of academic belonging. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

The Informative Process Model as a New Intervention for Attitude Change in Intractable Conflicts: Theory and Empirical Evidence.

Peacemaking is especially challenging in situations of intractable conflict. Collective narratives in this context contribute to coping with challenges societies face, but also fuel conflict continuation. We introduce the Informative Process Model (IPM), proposing that informing individuals about the socio-psychological processes through which conflict-supporting narratives develop, and suggesting that they can change via comparison to similar conflicts resolved peacefully, can facilitate unfreezing and change in attitudes. Study 1 established associations between awareness of conflict costs and conflict-supporting narratives, belief in the possibility of resolving the conflict peacefully and support for pursuing peace among Israeli-Jews and Palestinians. Studies 2 and 3 found that exposure to IPM-based original videos (vs. control) led Israeli-Jews to deliberation of the information presented, predicting acceptance of the IPM-based message, which, in turn, predicted support for negotiations. Study 3 also found similar effects across IPM-based messages focusing on different conflict-supporting themes. We discuss the implications to attitude change in intractable conflicts.

To Feel or Not to Feel When My Group Harms Others? The Regulation of Collective Guilt as Motivated Reasoning.

Four studies tested the proposition that regulation of collective guilt in the face of harmful ingroup behavior involves motivated reasoning. Cognitive energetics theory suggests that motivated reasoning is a function of goal importance, mental resource availability, and task demands. Accordingly, three studies conducted in the United States and Israel demonstrated that high importance of avoiding collective guilt, represented by group identification (Studies 1 and 3) and conservative ideological orientation (Study 2), is negatively related to collective guilt, but only when mental resources are not depleted by cognitive load. The fourth study, conducted in Italy, demonstrated that when justifications for the ingroup's harmful behavior are immediately available, the task of regulating collective guilt and shame becomes less demanding and less susceptible to resource depletion. By combining knowledge from the domains of motivated cognition, emotion regulation, and intergroup relations, these cross-cultural studies offer novel insights regarding factors underlying the regulation of collective guilt.

The psychology of martyrdom: making the ultimate sacrifice in the name of a cause.

Martyrdom is defined as the psychological readiness to suffer and sacrifice one's life for a cause. An integrative set of 8 studies investigated the concept of martyrdom by creating a new tool to quantitatively assess individuals' propensity toward self-sacrifice. Studies 1A-1C consisted of psychometric work attesting to the scale's unidimensionality, internal consistency, and temporal stability while examining its nomological network. Studies 2A-2B focused on the scale's predictive validity, especially as it relates to extreme behaviors and suicidal terrorism. Studies 3-5 focused on the influence of self-sacrifice on automatic decision making, costly and altruistic behaviors, and morality judgments. Results involving more than 2,900 participants from different populations, including a terrorist sample, supported the proposed conceptualization of martyrdom and demonstrated its importance for a vast repertoire of cognitive, emotional, and behavioral phenomena. Implications and future directions for the psychology of terrorism are discussed.

Terrorism--a (self) love story: redirecting the significance quest can end violence.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau's concepts of self-love (amour propre) and love of self (amour de soi même) are applied to the psychology of terrorism. Self-love is concern with one's image in the eyes of respected others, members of one's group. It denotes one's feeling of personal significance, the sense that one's life has meaning in accordance with the values of one's society. Love of self, in contrast, is individualistic concern with self-preservation, comfort, safety, and the survival of self and loved ones. We suggest that self-love defines a motivational force that when awakened arouses the goal of a significance quest. When a group perceives itself in conflict with dangerous detractors, its ideology may prescribe violence and terrorism against the enemy as a means of significance gain that gratifies self-love concerns. This may involve sacrificing one's self-preservation goals, encapsulated in Rousseau's concept of love of self. The foregoing notions afford the integration of diverse quantitative and qualitative findings on individuals' road to terrorism and back. Understanding the significance quest and the conditions of its constructive fulfillment may be crucial to reversing the current tide of global terrorism.

A New Stress-Based Model of Political Extremism: Personal Exposure to Terrorism, Psychological Distress, and Exclusionist Political Attitudes.

Does exposure to terrorism lead to hostility toward minorities? Drawing on theories from clinical and social psychology, we propose a stress-based model of political extremism in which psychological distress-which is largely overlooked in political scholarship-and threat perceptions mediate the relationship between exposure to terrorism and attitudes toward minorities. To test the model, a representative sample of 469 Israeli Jewish respondents was interviewed on three occasions at six-month intervals. Structural Equation Modeling indicated that exposure to terrorism predicted psychological distress (t1), which predicted perceived threat from Palestinian citizens of Israel (t2), which, in turn, predicted exclusionist attitudes toward Palestinian citizens of Israel (t3). These findings provide solid evidence and a mechanism for the hypothesis that terrorism introduces nondemocratic attitudes threatening minority rights. It suggests that psychological distress plays an important role in political decision making and should be incorporated in models drawing upon political psychology.