Open Collections

Ibasco, Gabrielle

University of British Columbia

When people from advantaged groups are confronted with information about their group’s immoral actions, they tend to respond with different group-based self-conscious emotions. Group-based guilt and moral shame are associated with intergroup reparation intentions, whereas image shame for the ingroup’s tarnished reputation leads members to avoid reconciliation. We introduce and test a model for how group-based moral pride regulates these different reactions to the ingroup’s transgressions. Across Studies 1-2, Canadians high on authentic group-based moral pride (AGMP), which entails genuine and grounded feelings of moral accomplishment, experienced higher levels of guilt and moral shame for Canada’s genocide of Indigenous people. Conversely, people high on hubristic group-based moral pride (HGMP), an inflated sense of moral superiority, experienced higher levels of image shame. Group-based moral shame accounted for a positive indirect association between AGMP and support for reparations, whereas image shame accounted for a positive indirect association between HGMP and avoidance intentions. In Study 3, we show that these divergent associations between each facet of group-based moral pride and guilt/moral shame are explained by defensive appraisals of an ingroup moral threat. In Studies 4-5, manipulated feelings of AGMP causally increased group-based guilt and moral shame, and these effects were found among both non-Indigenous Canadians (Study 4) and White Americans (Study 5). Group-based moral shame, in turn, mediated the effects of manipulated AGMP on increased support for reparations and decreased support for avoidance. These results contribute to a theoretical understanding of how self-conscious emotions regulate one another to influence intergroup relations.

Text

2024-08-08

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/88904

Psychology

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/