When school groups visit the Nazi Documentation Center in Cologne, Germany, “teachers often think that their job is to induce guilt in their students,” observes Roland Imhoff, a doctoral candidate in the department of social and legal psychology at the University of Bonn. “But pushing the guilt button may backfire,” he cautions. Supporting this warning is Imhoff’s dissertation, which shows that emphasizing Jews’ ongoing suffering from past atrocities may actually inflame anti-Semitism rather than cool it.
“There is a widespread assumption that collective guilt has positive outcomes,” notes Imhoff. Yet several theories in sociology and psychology offer a different logic: Guilt moves people not to relieve suffering, but to exacerbate it by rationalizing that the victims somehow deserve their plight. Other theories reach the same conclusion through different paths: Rather than guilt, people’s desire to believe in a just world or to maintain the status quo can lead them to despise victims. Noting these ironic misplacements of malice, the Israeli psychoanalyst Zvi Rex once quipped, “The Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz.”
Imhoff and his coauthor, University of Bonn professor Rainer Banse, captured this form of anti-Semitism in a novel laboratory experiment. University students first read a passage about the Holocaust that stressed either the anguish Jews experienced in the past or the distress that Holocaust survivors and their descendants still suffer today. While allegedly connected to a lie detector, these participants then completed tasks that measured both their conscious and unconscious attitudes toward Jews. Results revealed that participants who read about Jews’ ongoing suffering became more anti-Semitic, whereas those who read about Jews’ suffering in the past did not.
In a control condition that lacked the bogus lie detector, however, participants who read about Jews’ ongoing suffering reported far less anti-Jewish sentiment. The authors reason that, without a machine pressing them to answer honestly, these participants behaved according to the social norm of responding to suffering with empathy, rather than according to their true attitudes. Although social norms often steer individual actions, “under certain conditions these more or less hidden attitudes will sneak out—for example, if you feel safe to say unpopular things,” explains Imhoff.
One situation where people feel free to unleash their prejudices is the relative anonymity of the Internet. When science blogs first repoted this study’s findings, “what we feared would happen, happened,” says Imhoff. “There were a lot of anti-Semitic remarks that Jews should stop whining about the Holocaust.” This is not the researchers’ message, however. “Telling victims just to hide their suffering and be silent is not a viable solution,” he says.
Instead, Imhoff is exploring ways to work around people’s psychological defenses so that they might fully empathize with victims. In one line of research, for instance, he is examining whether taking the perspectives of injured parties can short-circuit people’s victim-blaming tendencies. “We need more research on the perpetrator side,” he says.
Roland Imhoff and Rainer Banse, “Ongoing Victim Suffering Increases Prejudice: The Case of Secondary Anti-Semitism,” Psychological Science, December 2009.
Read more stories by Alana Conner.