A Needs-Based Level of Construal: Members of Perceived Victim and Perpetrator Groups Prefer to Represent Transgressions at Different Levels of Abstraction

Informed by the needs-based model of reconciliation, we hypothesized that members of perceived perpetrator groups would prefer more abstract representations of historical or present transgressions than members of perceived victim groups. Six lab experiments (total N = 2,363; preregistered) and one study that examined the language used in Twitter posts (1,496 tweets; preregistered) supported this hypothesis across different intergroup contexts: the Holocaust (Jews and Germans), the war in Ukraine (Ukrainian and Russian official news agencies), and the massacres in Kafr Qasim and Ma’ale Akrabim (Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel). This effect was topic-specific (Study 1), ruling out cultural differences as an alternative explanation. Random assignment of participants to a context in which their in-group was the perpetrator or victim strengthened causal inference (Jewish Israelis in Study 3). Moreover, the different representation preferences were associated with perceived perpetrator (victim) group members’ need to restore their in-group’s moral (agentic) identity (Studies 3 and 4), and affirming these identity dimensions reduced the discrepancy in the representation preferences of members of perceived victim and perpetrator group (Study 5). Yielding evidence for important downstream consequences, members of perceived perpetrator and victim groups were readier to reconcile with out-group members who shared (vs. did not share) their representation preferences (Study 6), which was associated with need satisfaction (Study 7). Practical implications are discussed pertaining to the representation of transgressions in real-life contexts such as history books, memorials, museums, or news reports.