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by Deborah Shulman and Eran Halperin
Most of us intuitively believe that deliberately harming others is immoral. And yet people frequently engage in all kinds of harmful behavior, such as cheating, stealing, and lying, when it is within their interests. How does this happen?
A wealth of psychological research shows that people have a knack for morally justifying their harmful behavior. We desire to see ourselves as good and will go to great lengths to maintain a moral self-image.
Not only are we motivated to view ourselves as moral, but most of us wish to view the groups that we belong to as moral, too. According to social identity theory (Tajfel & Turner, 1986), this is because our sense of identity is partly derived from our social groups. Our group’s conduct, therefore, reflects on our own self-worth.
So we tend to justify, rather than condemn, harmful actions taken by our country and our nation. This defensiveness has especially dire consequences for intergroup conflicts, including those that are violent and intractable. Failure to objectively think about our group’s conduct in conflict leaves transgressions to go unchecked, allowing harm-doing to continue and escalate.
History shows that acknowledging wrongdoing is also vital for mending relations and building trust between groups. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission assembled in 1996 in post-apartheid South Africa is one of the most notable examples of how acknowledgment of past wrongdoings can facilitate conflict transformation. The public expressions of remorse made by perpetrators helped pave the way for intergroup healing and conciliation.
Our lab (the Psychology of Intergroup Conflict and Reconciliation lab at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem) explores the psychological origins of violent conflicts and designs psychological interventions intended to promote justice and conflict-resolution.
In this current project, we wanted to find out: Is there a way we can get people to start thinking more critically about their group’s harmful actions?
An answer came to us when we considered that people do not have any issue critically evaluating the behavior of groups in other contexts. We can easily detect wrongdoings of other groups in conflicts that are remote and unrelated to us. Existing research found, for example, that people were more likely to condemn torture when it was committed by another nation's security services, compared with when the same torture was perpetrated by their own nation’s security services (Tarrant, Branscombe, Warner & Weston, 2011). This led us to reason that if people were to evaluate unrelated harmdoing first, about which they are likely to think objectively, they would then think more objectively when evaluating harmful in-group conduct.
Moral analogies of this kind are used by campaigners and advocates of social issues regularly in a bid to make us think critically. For example, advocates of vegetarianism compare eating cows with eating a beloved pet dog. Opponents of the Trump border wall compared it with the oppressive Berlin Wall. These people reason that if we think the latter is wrong, then we should judge the former as wrong too.
Highlighting hypocrisy has indeed been found to influence our moral judgments. Recent studies found that White Americans are less likely to blame Muslims for terrorism committed by Islamic extremists after first being asked how responsible they think White people are for hate crimes committed in the name of White identity (Bruneau, Kteily & Falk, 2018). This suggests that analogies may also be a promising tool for increasing critical thinking about our own group’s violent conduct.
Together with the Reifen Lab at the IDC Herzliya, we tested the power of analogies for increasing acknowledgment of in-group-committed harm in conflict, in a paper recently published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (Shulman, Halperin, Kessler, Schori-Eyal, Reifen Tagar, 2020).
We conducted studies in the context of the ongoing intractable Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In this 100-year-long conflict, both sides have undoubtedly committed wrongdoing, resulting in tragic losses and suffering, and there is still no resolution in sight.
In our studies, all participants were Jewish-Israelis. We divided a total of 1500 participants into two groups. The first evaluated a case of in-group harmdoing – a home demolition carried out by Israel toward innocent Palestinian civilians whose relative had committed a deadly terrorist attack in Israel. Home demolition is a form of collective punishment (considered a violation of international law), as those who are harmed are not directly responsible for the initial crime.
The second group also evaluated the exact same case of in-group harmdoing, but only after they had evaluated a case (fabricated for the purposes of the research) depicting similar conduct in an unrelated context: collective punishment of innocent civilians in Sri Lanka whose relatives had engaged in political violence.
We found that participants in the second group, who first read and evaluated harmdoing in an unrelated context, ended up judging the in-group-perpetrated harmdoing as more morally wrong, compared with those who only evaluated the case of in-group harmdoing.
This happened because of a psychological process of analogical reasoning: When people consider two similar cases, extract a principle from one, and then believe it ought to be applied to the other. After being exposed to similar unrelated harmdoing, participants were more critical of collective punishment against family members, leading them to also view in-group-committed collective punishment as more wrong. Analogies can activate our moral standards when we have perhaps lost touch with them due to our other competing interests.
While our work demonstrated the effectiveness of analogies, there is reason to think that some types of analogies could backfire. Comparing in-group harmdoing to wrongdoings of the enemy group or those that are seen as extremely immoral in nature, for example, may be perceived as threatening and only increase defensiveness. So, what kinds of analogies trigger a boomerang effect? And what kind of analogies work best? These are still open questions that we at the lab are exploring. Nonetheless, our work suggests that analogical reasoning may attenuate our tendency to justify our group’s harmdoing and facilitate an important step toward intergroup conflict reconciliation.
Deborah Shulman is a doctoral researcher in social psychology at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena, co-supervised by Michal Reifen Tagar, Thomas Kessler, and Eran Halperin. She is currently based at the PICR Lab at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Reifen Lab at the IDC Herzliya.
References
Bruneau, E., Kteily, N., & Falk, E. (2018). Interventions highlighting hypocrisy reduce collective blame of Muslims for individual acts of violence and assuage anti-Muslim hostility. Personality and social psychology bulletin, 44(3), 430-448.
Shulman, D., Halperin, E., Kessler, T., Schori-Eyal, N., & Reifen Tagar, M. (2020). Exposure to Analogous Harmdoing Increases Acknowledgment of Ingroup Transgressions in Intergroup Conflicts. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 46(12), 1649-1664.
Tajfel, H., & Turner, J. (1986) . The social identity theory of intergroup behaviour. In S. Worchel & W. G. Austin (Eds.), Psychology of intergroup relations (2nd ed., pp. 7–24). Nelson Hall.
Tarrant, M., Branscombe, N. R., Warner, R. H., & Weston, D. (2012). Social identity and perceptions of torture: It's moral when we do it. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 48(2), 513-518.
