Moral Immemorial: The Rarity of Self‐Criticism for Previous Generations’ Genocide or Mass Violence

Abstract

Partly in response to political leaders’ public expressions of self‐criticism for past generations’ genocide or other mass violence, psychologists have suggested that individuals who are psychologically connected to perpetrators may view themselves as sharing some responsibility. Such broadened self‐perception should enable self‐criticism for past failures just as it enables self‐congratulation for past triumphs. We review studies of self‐criticism regarding European colonization (of Africa, the Americas, Australia, and Indonesia) and 20th century genocide (in Bosnia, Germany, Norway, and Rwanda). Self‐criticism—feelings of guilt, shame, and responsibility; wanting reparation—tended to be low. Self‐criticism appeared to be lowest among nonstudent samples, those allowed to explicitly disagree with self‐criticism, and those asked about more recent violence. Theoretical and practical implications of these patterns are discussed.

Assessing Natural Language: Measuring Emotion-Words within a Sentence or Without a Sentence?

“…In such cases, the participant has the possibility to deem the isolated emotion-words as less meaningful and therefore rate them lower. This tendency to avoid unpleasant emotions words by rating them lower might explain the low mean levels on unpleasant emotion words generally found in questionnaire research (Leach, Zeineddine, & Čehajić-Clancy, 2013).…”

When History Teaching Turns into Parrhesia: The Case of Italian Colonial Crimes

“…If we take into consideration both the model proposed by Nadler and Shnabel (2008;Shnabel and Nadler 2015) and the evidence of the possibility that often many years are needed for atrocities to be overtly recognized and officially narrated to descendants of perpetrators' group (Leach et al 2013), we can agree on the idea that the same needs foreseen for perpetrators and victims may go down the generations, to influence descendants of victims and perpetrators too (Bilewicz and Jaworska 2013;Leone 2012).…”

Attribution of Guilt to Offspring of Perpetrators of the Genocide: Rwandan People's Perspectives

“…On a more general level, these qualitatively different attitudes have also been reported in a review of studies regarding European colonization of the other continents, and twentieth‐century genocides, although overall feelings of guilt and moral responsibility in most of these studies tended to be low. The authors noted, “Generally speaking, it seems most accurate to describe this literature as examining the absence, rather than the presence, of self‐criticism for the in‐group's mass violence” (Leach, Bou Zeineddine, and Čehajić‐Clancy , 46).…”