Towards a Narrative Understanding of Victimhood: The Perception of Intergroup Conflicts in Light of Past Ingroup Victimization

Abstract

The present study explores the role of linguistic compositional characteristics in transmitting collective victimhood beliefs. Experimentally manipulated excerpts of history textbooks were used to examine the perception of the victim position of national outgroups and its intermediary social psychological processes with Hungarian (N = 415) and Finnish (N = 116) participants. The results reveal that the narrative composition of the victimhood narrative had a significant effect on the perception of the target groups' victimhood position. The evaluation of the groups changed according to which variant of the story was introduced. The results demonstrate that the perception of a perpetrator group can be changed purely by means of narrative construction and that their actions can acquire a "victim tone". This effect is present in both the Hungarian and Finnish samples, suggesting that narrating an event of victimhood has certain universal characteristics, although their effect is partially dependent on the national-historical-cultural context.