Overcoming competitive victimhood and facilitating forgiveness through re-categorization into a common victim or perpetrator identity

• Inducing Jews and Palestinians with a common victim identity reduced their moral defensiveness.
• Inducing Jews and Palestinians with a common perpetrator identity increased their sense of agency.
• Both decreased moral defensiveness and increased agency led to decreased competitive victimhood.
• Decreased competitive victimhood led to increased forgiveness.
• The induction of a common regional identity failed to set these processes in motion.

We argue that facilitating forgiveness among groups involved in intractable conflicts requires reducing competitive victimhood which stems from the conflicting parties' motivation to restore agency and a positive moral image. Examining novel and traditional re-categorization interventions, Study 1 found that inducing Israeli Jews and Palestinians with a common victim identity decreased competitive victimhood, which in turn increased forgiveness. Inducing a common regional identity failed to initiate a similar process. Study 2 further revealed that inducing either a common victim or a common perpetrator identity (but not a common regional identity) led to decreased competitive victimhood and increased forgiveness. The mechanisms involved were decreased moral defensiveness in the common victim intervention versus increased sense of agency in the common perpetrator intervention.