Two studies explored the impact of micro justice (individual focus) and macro justice (societal focus) on perceptions of fairness within the context of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in South Africa. All participants read and listened to a detailed description of the TRC and were asked to judge the fairness of the overall process and components of the TRC. In Study 1 participants were given a writing task that primed micro-versus macro-level processing, whereas in Study 2 they were asked questions framed at either a micro or macro level. In both studies participants in the micro-justice condition perceived the TRC as less fair than those in the macro-justice condition. The paper includes a brief review of a field study that explored perceptions of justice in Rwanda that inspired the current research. Implications of micro-versus macro-justice perspectives for studying fairness and promoting reconciliation in post-and current-conflict societies are discussed.The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in South Africa was established to secure a new society, freed from the memories of oppression, humiliation, and suffering endured under the reign of apartheid. Established in 1995 as a compromise between the outgoing government and the African National Congress, the TRC spent five years documenting atrocities committed during apartheid. Some perpetrators were granted amnesty in exchange for testimony of their transgressions, and victims were given a space to tell their own horror stories, to be heard and respected by the nation and the world. It was a massive effort to create a new collective consciousness that could move the society forward and reintegrate a previously segregated populace. Given the granting of amnesty, it was recognized that individual victims were unlikely to receive justice in the typical retributive sense.
Dehumanization is routinely invoked in social science and law as the primary factor in explaining how propaganda encourages support for, or participation in, violence against targeted outgroups. Yet the primacy of dehumanization is increasingly challenged by the apparent influence of revenge on collective violence. This study examines critically how various propaganda influence audiences. Although previous research stresses the dangers of dehumanizing propaganda, a recently published study found that only revenge propaganda significantly lowered outgroup empathy. Given the importance of these findings for law and the behavioral sciences, this research augments that recent study with two additional samples that were culturally distinct from the prior findings, showing again that only revenge propaganda was significant. To explore this effect further, we also conducted a facial electromyography (fEMG) among a small set of participants, finding that revenge triggered significantly stronger negative emotions against outgroups than dehumanization.
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