To Defend or not to Defend--the Low Glorifier's Question: the Relationship between Low Glorifiers' Defensiveness of Ingroup-Perpetrated Harm and the Tangibility of Intergroup Conflict
Members of groups in conflict are often defensive of ingroup-perpetrated violence, especially if they glorify their ingroup. While past literature has established that high glorifiers are unconditionally defensive of their ingroup, findings regarding low glorifiers are mixed, with some studies findi...
| Main Author: | |
|---|---|
| Format: | Others |
| Published: |
ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst
2019
|
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://scholarworks.umass.edu/masters_theses_2/786 https://scholarworks.umass.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1815&context=masters_theses_2 |
| Summary: | Members of groups in conflict are often defensive of ingroup-perpetrated violence, especially if they glorify their ingroup. While past literature has established that high glorifiers are unconditionally defensive of their ingroup, findings regarding low glorifiers are mixed, with some studies finding low glorifiers to be similarly defensive as high glorifiers and others finding low glorifiers to not be defensive or even critical of the ingroup. Across six studies, I investigated whether perceiving a conflict to be tangible (rather than intangible) drives defensiveness among low glorifiers. I tested this hypothesis across two national contexts that were naturally closer (Israel) or farther (the U.S.) from the same conflict (the Syrian conflict). I found that Israeli low glorifiers were defensive of their ingroup, whereas American low glorifiers were not (Studies 1a/1b) and that Israelis found the conflict tangible, whereas Americans found the conflict relatively intangible (Studies 2a/2b). Across Study 3 and Study 4, I found experimental evidence that low glorifiers in Serbia (study 3) and the U.S. (study 4) are more defensive of ingroup-perpetrated violence when the conflict context is tangible than when it is relatively intangible. |
|---|