Suchergebnisse

How does accountability impact political decisions? Though previous research on accountability has demonstrated its potential effects in the realms of business, elections, and more, very little research has explored the effect of citizen accountability in highly ideological, intractable, and political conflicts. This article addresses this issue, looking at the unique interaction between accountability and ideology on Israeli citizens' political attitudes regarding the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The results of two experimental studies in Israel reveal that accountable individuals behave in significantly more ideologically partisan ways than their nonaccountable counterparts. Moreover, this polarization is dependent on the specific conflict context, with leftists more affected by the issue of negotiations and rightists by security concerns. This signals that ideological polarization under accountability may depend on the "issue ownership" each ideological group feels toward the specific conflict context and its corresponding social goal of projecting ideological consistency on these issues.

Abstract. Parents vary in the extent to which they want their children to feel empathy toward different groups. In the current investigation, we tested whether Jewish–Israeli mothers' motivation to have their children feel group-based empathy toward members of their ingroup (Jews) and outgroup (Arabs) differed as a function of the types of group identification mothers experience with their own group – namely attachment to and glorification of Israel. We found that the more mothers identified with Israel, both in terms of attachment and glorification, the more they wanted their child to feel empathy toward ingroup members. However, only to the extent that mothers glorified their group, did they want their child to feel less empathy toward outgroup members. Our findings point to potential importance of considering mothers' group identity as related to the transmission of intergroup empathy and the perpetuation of intergroup conflict across generations.