May clarity about in-group crimes be a better choice, when narrating the story of past war to perpetrators descendents?

The aim of our study is to explore how clear vs. fuzzy knowledge on war’s violence, meant to socialize to the their national story the new members of ex-enemies groups that are born after the end of the war, may enhance or slow down reconciliation processes (Nadler, 2011). We put the general hypothesis that narratives of national history, that are crucial to shape the overall social representation of the past of one’s own group (László, Ehmann and Imre, 1999 ), when addressing new generations of both victims’ and perpetrators’ group play a crucial role in shape the overall direction of reconciliation processes as well. Moreover, referring to different psycho-social needs of victims and perpetrators (Nadler and Shnabel, 2008) we propose that clear narratives, as compared with evasive ones, may help descendents of perpetrators to elaborate a deeper change of the overall social representation of their own groups, so leading to a firmer reconciliation (Leone and Mastrovito, 2010). On the contrary, we expect that more evasive narratives on these same war’s episodes, although at face value being more effective to protect in-group positive social identity, will not touch social representations of the in-group, leading therefore only to processes of false reconciliation (Ignatieff, 1986). According to this theoretical frame, we aim to explore socio-psychological effects of clear vs. evasive narratives of in-group war crimes, addressed to young adults born after the end of war, analyzing their negative emotions -- due to the difficult knowledge of the in-group past conveyed by these narrative – as well as their readiness to help in the future the group of former victims. To fulfill these research aims, we asked 103 Italian young participants (75 women) to read a clear vs, an evasive narrative of war crimes committed by the in-group during the Italian invasion of Ethiopia. We chose this episode of their in-group past both for the seriousness of these Italian war crimes and for the current social amnesia about them (Pivato, 2007): amnesia that we interpret as a signal of false reconciliation. Results showed that, as compared to the evasive one, the clear narrative caused more negative emotions. However, participants reading the clear narrative remembered it better than participants reading the evasive one, so suggesting that they better understood its dramatic contents (Bartlett, 1932). Finally, readers of the clear narrative declared to be more ready to help the group of former victims than readers of the evasive one, showing by that their stronger reparative attitude towards the other group (Nadler, Harpaz-Gorodeisky and Ben-David 2009). Based on these data, a discussion on theoretical shortcomings of the role of negative emotions and of group-serving bias on intergroup reconciliation processing will be proposed.