Craig W. Blatz

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at MacEwan University

Past research finds that people hold moderate views on political issues while believing others are extreme. This false polarization has been demonstrated across a variety of different attitude dimensions and is explained by naive realism, the belief that one holds an unbiased view of reality. We argue that because people believe they see the world...

Many scholars, politicians, and pundits speculate that apologies and reparations for historical injustices improve intergroup relations and affirm social identities. We examined these questions in two studies. In Study 1, we surveyed a group of Chinese and non-Chinese Canadians before and after the Canadian government apologized for unjust policies...

After intergroup injustices, perpetrator groups may seek to restore intergroup relations by offering an apology. Through quantitative empirical tests some scholars have examined whether these apologies promote forgiveness and reconciliation. This work has found inconsistent relations between apology and forgiveness. We proposed and tested other var...

In the legal literature, “privity” refers to the link between a minority's current social, psychological, and economic problems and its previous mistreatment by the government. Scholars speculate that judgments of privity underlie support for redress for historical injustices. There is no gold standard for evaluating privity, however, and its asses...

Many scholars, politicians, and pundits speculate that apologies and reparations for historical injustices improve intergroup relations and affirm social identities. We examined these questions in two studies. In Study 1, we surveyed a group of Chinese and non-Chinese Canadians before and after the Canadian government apologized for unjust policies...

Apology and reparations can facilitate the transition from conflict to peace, but the processes of deciding to offer them, determining their content, and deciding whether to accept their terms can themselves give rise to additional conflict. We examine these processes in this chapter, starting with a discussion of the parties involved: victims, per...

It has been recently proposed that people can flexibly rely on sources of control that are both internal and external to the self to satisfy the need to believe that their world is under control (i.e., that events do not unfold randomly or haphazardly). Consistent with this, past research demonstrates that, when personal control is threatened, peop...

Governments and political groups around the world are increasingly offering apologies to atone for past injustices. In recent years social psychologists have begun to empirically explore whether these apologies improve intergroup relations. We organize this literature into a framework outlining potential outcomes of intergroup apologies, mediators...

This chapter presents research and theory focusing on how individuals and governments respond to historical injustices. The chapter proposes that people and groups remember negative historical events more benignly, if they remember them at all, to maintain positive views of important groups and social systems. The focus is placed on studies demonst...

This text introduces students, scholars, and interested educated readers to the issues of human memory broadly considered, encompassing both individual memory, collective remembering by societies, and the construction of history. The book is organised around several major questions: How do memories construct our past? How do we build shared collect...

Scholars from various disciplines suggest that government apologies for historical injustices fulfill important psychological goals. After reviewing psychological literature that contributes to this discussion, we present a list of elements that political apologies should contain to be acceptable to both members of the victimized minority and the n...

People who score high on modern racism scales consistently oppose reparations for race-based social injustices. Scholars debate whether this opposition reflects racism [e.g., Sears, D. O., & Henry, P. J. (2005). Over thirty years later: A contemporary look at symbolic racism. In M.P Zanna, (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology, Vol. 37...

Where were you when you first heard about the 9/11 attacks? Do you remember what you were doing at the time? How did you feel when you first heard the news, and how does thinking about this event make you feel now? As of this writing, many Americans over the age of 15 most likely find these questions remarkably easy to answer. The fact that a singu...

Older (mean age = 74.23) and younger (mean age = 33.50) participants recalled items from 6 briefly exposed household scenes either alone or with their spouses. Collaborative recall was compared with the pooled, nonredundant recall of spouses remembering alone (nominal groups). The authors examined hits, self-generated false memories, and false memo...

Pigeons were trained in a matching task in which samples involved presentation of a white line on a green background (feature-present) or on an otherwise dark key (feature-absent). After asymmetrical training in which one group was initially trained with the feature-present sample and another was initially trained with the feature-absent sample, ma...