Project Details
Projekt
Third-party judgments of apology rejection in intergroup conflicts
Applicant
Dr. Fiona Kazarovytska
Subject Area
Social Psychology, Industrial and Organisational Psychology
Term
since 2026
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 572025516
Public apologies for collective crimes have become a prominent part of international politics. While existing research has focused on the effects of perpetrator groups issuing apologies, growing public interest is turning to how victims respond to such apologies. Whether the victim group accepts or rejects an offered apology is not only relevant for victim-perpetrator relations, but the victims’ voice is also becoming increasingly important in (post-)conflict justice politics. Moving beyond the lens of dyadic victim-perpetrator relations, the current project examines the perspectives of uninvolved third parties on apologetic interactions. Although not directly involved in the conflict, third parties often play a decisive role in the course of conflicts, and the global standing of the conflicting groups in the aftermath of violence. In our recent preliminary work, we have been able to establish the novel finding that uninvolved third parties judge victim groups to be less moral if they reject an offered intergroup apology instead of accepting it. This victim group morality effect appears robust across different types of crimes, timeframes since the offenses occurred, and both high- and low-quality apologies. Building on this foundation, the goal of the proposed project is to gain new insights into third-party perceptions of apologetic responses. The project pursues three core objectives: (1) to systematically explain why rejecting an apology leads to lower judgments of the victim group’s morality; (2) to test how these judgments vary across national contexts; and (3) to examine the social costs for the victim groups associated with such judgments. These objectives are addressed in three complementary work packages. The first two work packages test two different mechanisms that may underlie the victim group morality effect. Methodologically, we propose a range of experimental paradigms using artificial alien scenarios, real-world conflict scenarios, and economic game approaches (WP1-2). Based on the reasoning regarding these mechanisms, we have compelling reasons to anticipate substantial cross-contextual variation in the effect. Therefore, a third work package tests the victim group morality effect across 12 countries that differ in their historical representations and approaches to conflict resolution (WP3). All three packages further examine the social costs that victim groups may face when they reject an apology, using both scale and behavioral real-choice measures (WP1-3). Together, the project offers a nuanced account of the moral signaling power of victim group responses in apologetic interactions. The findings promise implications not only for the understanding of intergroup apologies and social judgments but also for the fields of moral psychology and the role of third parties in international conflicts.
DFG Programme
Research Grants
International Connection
Belgium, India, Israel, Poland, United Kingdom
