Overcoming competitive victimhood and facilitating forgiveness through re-categorization into a common victim or perpetrator identity ☆ Nurit Shnabel a, ⁎, Samer Halabi b , Masi Noor c a Tel-Aviv University, Israel b Tel-Aviv Yaffo Academic College, Israel c Canterbury Christ Church University, UK HIGHLIGHTS • Inducing Jews and Palestinians with a common victim identity reduced their moral defensiveness. • Inducing Jews and Palestinians with a common perpetrator identity increased their sense of agency. • Both decreased moral defensiveness and increased agency led to decreased competitive victimhood. • Decreased competitive victimhood led to increased forgiveness. • The induction of a common regional identity failed to set these processes in motion. abstract article info Article history: Received 6 October 2012 Revised 11 April 2013 Available online xxxx Keywords: Competitive victimhood Israeli-Palestinian conflict Intergroup forgiveness Common ingroup identity model Agency Moral image We argue that facilitating forgiveness among groups involved in intractable conflicts requires reducing competitive victimhood which stems from the conflicting parties' motivation to restore agency and a positive moral image. Examining novel and traditional re-categorization interventions, Study 1 found that inducing Israeli Jews and Palestinians with a common victim identity decreased competitive victimhood, which in turn increased forgiveness. Inducing a common regional identity failed to initiate a similar process. Study 2 further revealed that inducing either a common victim or a common perpetrator identity (but not a common regional identity) led to decreased competitive victimhood and increased forgiveness. The mechanisms involved were decreased moral defensiveness in the common victim intervention versus increased sense of agency in the common perpetrator intervention. © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Introduction Groups involved in prolonged, violent conflicts compete over various tangible and psychological resources, including their victim status (Kelman, 2008). Specifically, adversarial groups often engage in competi- tive victimhood, that is, they are strongly motivated to establish that their ingroup has been subjected to more injustice and suffering at the hands of the outgroup than the other way round (Noor, Shnabel, Halabi, & Nadler, 2012). Tragically, groups' engagement in competitive victimhood was found to be associated with reduced willingness to forgive the outgroup, that is, to abandon retaliation and seek reconciliation despite the traumat- ic past (Noor, Brown, Gonzalez, Manzi, & Lewis, 2008). The case of Jews and Palestinians serves to illustrate this destructive dynamics. Efforts by Jews and Palestinians to establish that their ingroup is the “real” victim of the conflict are evident at both the collective level (e.g. in these groups' historical narratives; Baram & Klar, 2012; see also Hammack, 2008) and the interpersonal level (e.g. in encounters between Jewish and Palestinian participants in dialog groups; Sonnenschein, 2008). These groups' strong need to establish their ingroup's victimization makes them unwilling to let go of the grudge they hold against the outgroup and to consider the possibility of more harmonious future relations (Shnabel & Noor, 2012). The present research was designed to develop two novel interven- tions to reduce Jews' and Palestinians' engagement in competitive victimhood and open them, in turn, to mutual forgiveness. While our research focused on the conflict between Jews and Palestinians, it examined general psychological processes that are also likely to be applicable to other contexts of intractable conflicts (i.e., prolonged, vi- olent conflicts that are perceived as existential and zero-sum in nature, Bar-Tal, 2007). Journal of Experimental Social Psychology xxx (2013) xxx–xxx ☆ The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013) under grant agreement no. 2934602 [PCIG09-GA-2011-293602]. It has also been supported by a research grant from the Tel-Aviv-Yaffo Academic College awarded to the second and third authors. ⁎ Corresponding author at: Tel-Aviv University, School of Psychological Sciences, Israel. E-mail address: shnabeln@post.tau.ac.il (N. Shnabel). YJESP-03049; No. of pages: 11; 4C: 0022-1031/$ – see front matter © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2013.04.007 Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect Journal of Experimental Social Psychology journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jesp Please cite this article as: Shnabel, N., et al., Overcoming competitive victimhood and facilitating forgiveness through re-categorization into a com- mon victim or perpetrator identity, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2013.04.007