The social psychology of collective victimhood

Abstract Collective victimhood, which results from the experience of being targeted as members of a group, has powerful effects on individuals and groups. The focus of this Special Issue is on how people respond to collective victimhood and how these responses shape intergroup relations. We introduce the Special Issue with an overview of emerging social psychological research on collective victimhood. To date, this research has focused mostly on destructive versus positive consequences of collective victimhood for relations with an adversary group, and examined victim groups' needs, victim beliefs, and underlying social identity and categorization processes. We identify several neglected factors in this literature, some of which are addressed by the empirical contributions in the current issue. The Special Issue offers novel perspectives on collective victimhood, presenting findings based on a diverse range of methods with mostly community samples that have direct and vicarious experiences of collective harm in different countries.