How do members of a perpetrator group negotiate multiple past ingroup transgressions? A German case study

How members of perpetrator groups engage with their ingroup’s negative history has received increasing attention over the past years. Yet, little research has addressed how people psychologically negotiate multiple past ingroup transgressions. Across two studies ( n = 362), we exposed German participants to information about two ingroup transgressions, the Holocaust and the colonial genocide in former South West Africa, to test ideas of a multidirectional memory (= one memory productively informs another) versus a competitive memory (= memories stand in competition) effect. Along six indicators of memory (negativity and significance, acknowledging responsibility, collective guilt and shame, willingness to make reparations), we find that people build small memory hierarchies when given the opportunity. Overall, however, it seems that most people show similar levels of history engagement for different transgressions. We discuss how our findings relate to the public discourse on multiple memories.