Beyond comparisons: The complexity and context‐dependency of collective victim beliefs

Abstract

Social psychological research on collective victimhood has focused on just a few ways in which people think about the ingroup's victimization that imply certain assumptions and limit our understanding of collective victim beliefs. Additionally, different historical and sociopolitical contexts may make different collective victim beliefs relevant. This article examines collective victim beliefs expressed in open-ended survey responses among six different groups: Northern Irish participants, Greek Cypriots, Hungarians, Poles, Jewish Americans, and Armenian Americans (N = 638). Qualitative content analysis revealed five broader categories with several collective victim beliefs each. General appraisals of the ingroup's collective victimization entailed centrality of ingroup victimization versus defocusing victimhood. More specific appraisals included contextspecific characteristics of the ingroup's victimization, perceptions of the perpetrator group (attributions of blame), and perceptions of other victim groups (comparative victim beliefs, including rejecting comparisons). The findings extend and challenge commonly studied collective victim beliefs, and propose novel theoretical directions.

‘You don't compare horrors, you just don't do that’: Examining assumptions and extending the scope of comparative victim beliefs

“…Nevertheless, the description of the contexts examined here and the convergence of some themes across groups with very different histories of collective victimization, cultural frames of reference, and current social and political contexts provide insights into the findings' transferability (Braun & Clarke, 2022; Lincoln & Guba, 1985). Additionally, some of the present findings (specifically, rejecting dichotomies between inclusive and exclusive victim beliefs, downward comparisons and rejecting comparisons) corresponded to findings from another study including other communities, and using a different qualitative methodology (Vollhardt, Szabó, et al, 2021b). Nevertheless, studies among a greater variety of communities with different experiences of collective victimization may yield different results.…”

“…Our findings offer some insight into other ways in which people make sense of their group's victimization and aspects of these experiences that are deemed relevant and woven into collective narratives of the group's victimization: such as notions of the group's power in different domains and at different times, including narratives of ingroup resistance. However, it was beyond the scope of the present paper to analyse additional collective victim beliefs that participants brought up, and future research will need to examine this question in more depth and in different contexts (see also Vollhardt, Szabó, et al, 2021b).…”

“…This could involve taking a rhetorical approach to studying how specific claims related to collective victimization are used flexibly (McNeill et al, 2017). Additionally, it is important to avoid focusing too much on comparative victim beliefs and to move towards understanding which other collective victim beliefs people focus on in different contexts in addition, or instead (Vollhardt, Szabó, et al, 2021b).…”

“…However, most social psychological research that assesses collective victim beliefs (also often referred to as ‘collective victimhood’) has not captured this complexity. Instead, recent reviews (Szabó, 2020; Vollhardt, Szabó, et al, 2021b) show that most of this research focuses on comparisons between the ingroup's and outgroup's collective victimization (i.e. comparative victim beliefs; Noor et al, 2017; Szabó, 2020)—above all, claims that the ingroup suffered more than other groups (i.e.…”

“…We argue that these foci and assumptions are shaped by the methods, contexts and theoretical frameworks that have dominated this literature (see also Vollhardt, Szabó, et al, 2021b). The present paper, therefore, uses a qualitative approach—specifically, thematic analysis of focus group interviews—in four distinct (and mostly understudied) contexts of the aftermath of collective violence to examine these assumptions of the social psychological literature on collective victim beliefs and expand their current conceptualization.…”