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Collective Guilt

Guilt is an unpleasant emotional reaction that occurs with the perception of having committed some type of moral violation. Historically, psychological research on guilt has focused on the feelings of guilt that arise when people feel personally responsible for causing illegitimate harm to others. Recent research has revealed that people can have similar feelings of guilt when their group is perceived to be responsible for illegitimately harming members of another group. This collective guilt results from sharing a social identity with others whose actions represent a threat to the positivity of that identity. Thus even though others were responsible for the harm or moral violation, and the individual is not directly implicated in the harm-doing, the individual can still have feelings of collective guilt.

A wide range of intergroup inequalities can elicit these feelings, from the receipt of unearned benefits or privileges that members of other groups do not receive to more extreme forms of harm-doing, including genocide. Given the aversive nature of collective guilt, people are motivated to avoid or decrease its intensity. There are several methods for doing so; these generally involve distorting perceptions of the ingroup's behavior (e.g., minimizing the extent of harm done, denying the harmful actions entirely) or justifying its actions (e.g., because the victims deserved their outcomes or the ingroup had legitimate reasons for causing the harm it inflicted). Use of all of these options can help to maintain a positive social identity when even the gravest of ingroup harm-doing is confronted.

Despite its aversive nature, feeling collective guilt can lead to positive social outcomes, such as reducing negative attitudes toward the harmed outgroup and promoting intergroup reconciliation through apologies or reparations. These benefits are particularly likely when repairing the harm done is perceived to be not too difficult or costly, so that correcting the wrongs committed by the ingroup seems both feasible and worthwhile.

What Causes Collective Guilt?

Several factors influence whether, and how much, collective guilt is experienced in response to reminders of ingroup harm-doing. First, one's social identity must be salient. For one to experience collective guilt, one must perceive oneself as a member of a social group that has committed illegitimate harm against an outgroup. This produces a perceptual shift from thinking of oneself in terms of “I” or “me” toward thinking of oneself in terms of “we” or “us.” In this way, the self can be linked with past or present ingroup harm-doing. For instance, contemporary Americans can certainly claim that they personally did not participate in slavery or the colonization of indigenous peoples. Nonetheless, when contemporary Americans think about themselves as part of the historical legacy, from which they may even benefit in the present, they can experience collective guilt based on the past actions of the larger “we.”

The second factor that influences the extent to which collective guilt is experienced is collective responsibility. In order to feel collective guilt, it is important for people to perceive their group as responsible for the harm done to the outgroup. One basis for attributing responsibility to a group is perceiving that group as having benefited from the harm done to the outgroup. For instance, existing racial inequality can be framed in terms of the consequences that it has for outgroup members, or in terms of the consequences that it has for ingroup members. Thus researchers framed racial inequality in the United States in terms of Black disadvantage or White privilege. The framing of racial inequality as “Black disadvantage” allowed White participants to feel less collectively responsible for the harm done to the outgroup, which lessened collective guilt. Framing racial inequality as “White privilege” increased White participants' feelings of collective responsibility for the harm done to the outgroup, leading to greater collective guilt.

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