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The magnitude gap: Revealing differences in recall between victims and perpetrators
Abstract
The magnitude gap refers to the consistent differences in recall between victims and perpetrators (Baumeister, Stillwell, and Wotman, 1990). Victims recall a series of provocations leading up to an incident as well as the consequences afterwards, whereas perpetrators recall an incident as bracketed in time, omitting previous provocations and later consequences. Victims omit situational influences and recall more emotion, whereas perpetrators recall incidents as resulting from situational factors, often with the victim overreacting. This chapter introduces new research on the magnitude gap in free recall, with a focus on metamemory. In free recall, victim accounts were almost 20% longer than perpetrator accounts, showing significantly more description of the aftermath, more remembered conversation, and more quantitative detail, whereas perpetrators' accounts included more justification for their behavior. The metamemory analysis revealed that time was experienced as slowing down in a majority of victim incidents but that there was no reported change in experienced time with a majority of perpetrator incidents, though nearly one-third of the perpetrator incidents led to the experience of time moving more quickly. In addition, with victim incidents the most frequently reported reason for retrieval was that these incidents still generated emotion. This chapter applies the experimental findings on the magnitude gap to truth commissions, where victims and perpetrators confront each other with discrepant accounts of the same events. The chapter focuses on South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) as an exemplar for the twenty-eight national truth commissions conducted to date. During the TRC, victims of apartheid recalled events to document the crimes committed against them and to seek reparations, whereas perpetrators recalled events to detail the crimes they committed during apartheid and to obtain amnesty. Consistent with the experimental literature, the TRC hearings revealed dramatic and predictable discrepancies between the memories of perpetrators and victims. Perpetrators bracketed their criminal incidents within narrow time frames and in the context of doing their jobs; victims recalled the incidents as an extended series of events that continued to generate emotion. Moreover, many victims did not believe the discrepancies between their own personal memories and those of the perpetrators, and they went on record stating that the perpetrators failed to disclose fully, potentially denying them amnesty. Research on the magnitude gap can help explain the profound differences in recall between victims and perpetrators during truth commissions, ultimately contributing to the overall effectiveness of these commissions.
... How people remember the interpersonal aspects of their lives can greatly influence their relationship satisfaction (e.g., Karney, & Coombs, 2000;Karney, & Frye, 2002), evaluations of themselves and others (Takaku, Green, & Ohbuchi, 2010;Wilson, & Ross, 2001), and subjective well-being (Kitayama, Markus, & Masaru, 2000). Although studies have examined factors that moderate people's memory for interpersonal transgressions from the perspectives of the perpetrator and the victim (Feeney & Hill, 2006;Kraft, 2009), no study that we know of has taken into consideration the role of culture in shaping the remembering process (Wang, 2013). This study examined perpetrator and victim memories in Asian and European American young adults, and how the construction of such memories was related to individuals' self-acceptance. ...
This study examined cultural effects on memory for interpersonal transgressions and the relation to self-acceptance. Asian and European American college students each recalled two specific incidents, one in which they hurt or wronged others (perpetrator memory) and one in which others hurt or wronged them (victim memory). Although both Asians and European Americans tended to minimize the harm in the perpetrator memory and maximize the harm in the victim memory, Asians exhibited a greater degree of harm minimization in both types of memories than did European Americans. Furthermore, for the victim memory, harm maximization (i.e., amplifying harms done by others) was negatively associated with self-acceptance for Asians, whereas harm minimization (i.e., downplaying harms done by others) was negatively associated with self-acceptance for European Americans. The culturally divergent implications of self-serving and relationship-serving biases in constructing interpersonal transgression memories are discussed.
... How people remember the interpersonal aspects of their lives can greatly influence their relationship satisfaction (e.g., Karney, & Coombs, 2000;Karney, & Frye, 2002), evaluations of themselves and others (Takaku, Green, & Ohbuchi, 2010;Wilson, & Ross, 2001), and subjective well-being (Kitayama, Markus, & Masaru, 2000). Although studies have examined factors that moderate people's memory for interpersonal transgressions from the perspectives of the perpetrator and the victim (Feeney & Hill, 2006;Kraft, 2009), no study that we know of has taken into consideration the role of culture in shaping the remembering process (Wang, 2013). This study examined perpetrator and victim memories in Asian and European American young adults, and how the construction of such memories was related to individuals' self-acceptance. ...
This book brings together scholarship that contributes diverse and new perspectives on childhood amnesia – the scarcity of memories for very early life events. The topics of the studies reported in the book range from memories of infants and young children for recent and distant life events, to mother–child conversations about memories for extended lifetime periods, and to retrospective recollections of early childhood in adolescents and adults. The methodological approaches are diverse and theoretical insights rich. The findings together show that childhood amnesia is a complex and malleable phenomenon and that the waning of childhood amnesia and the development of autobiographical memory are shaped by a variety of interactive social and cognitive factors.
https://www.routledge.com/Remembering-and-Forgetting-Early-Childhood-1st-Edition/Wang-Gulgoz/p/book/9780367466305
... How people remember the interpersonal aspects of their lives can greatly influence their relationship satisfaction (e.g., Karney, & Coombs, 2000;Karney, & Frye, 2002), evaluations of themselves and others (Takaku, Green, & Ohbuchi, 2010;Wilson, & Ross, 2001), and subjective well-being (Kitayama, Markus, & Masaru, 2000). Although studies have examined factors that moderate people's memory for interpersonal transgressions from the perspectives of the perpetrator and the victim (Feeney & Hill, 2006;Kraft, 2009), no study that we know of has taken into consideration the role of culture in shaping the remembering process (Wang, 2013). This study examined perpetrator and victim memories in Asian and European American young adults, and how the construction of such memories was related to individuals' self-acceptance. ...
People tend to perceive themselves more favourably than others, but the degree to which individuals exhibit this bias may be influenced by cultural upbringing. Korean ( n = 271) and American ( n = 503) participants were asked to evaluate current and future health expectations for themselves and others. Results showed that American participants rated their own future health more positively than others' future health, whereas Korean participants rated their own and others' future health similarly. Given its role in patient health behaviour, implications for creating context-sensitive interventions for future health expectations are discussed.
... Perpetrators tended to present their transgression as unrelated to previous or subsequent assaults, whereas victims tended to depict the incident as part of a continued series of assaults against them. Also, while admitting that their acts were morally wrong, perpetrators justifi ed their violence; in contrast, victims described the violence as incomprehensible (Kraft, 2009). ...
Philosopher George Santayana is probably best known today for his aphorism, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Variations of this quote appear frequently when countries, ethnic groups, or individuals engage in conflicts over economic, legal, or territorial issues. The version of history provided by one’s own side is depicted as a true account of the past, whereas contrasting versions provided by one’s opponents are deemed to be lies. In the current chapter, we examine bases of conflicting narratives of the past. We document how individual- and group-level factors (e.g., needs, goals, motives) shape historical memories, and how historical memories exacerbate conflict. In the final section of the chapter, we consider how memories can be used promote reconciliation rather conflict.
... Victims' accounts of the transgressions emphasize the negative and lasting consequences of the harm and the perpetrators' responsibility, whereas perpetrators focus on the mitigating circumstances that led them to carry the acts and minimize the consequences of their actions on the victims (Baumeister and Catanese 2001). At the level of intergroup conflict, Kraft (2009) observes similar discrepancies in accounts given by victims and perpetrators to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. However, previous research has not assessed how ingroup identification might differentially influence these discrepancies. ...
Two U.S. studies report a differential effect of identity centrality and in-group superiority on reactions to in-group victimization and in-group harm-doing. Study 1 (N = 80) found that higher identity centrality predicted less justification for freely-recalled in-group victim events, whereas higher in-group superiority predicted more justification for freely-recalled in-group harm-doing events. Study 2 (N = 105) reexamined these findings in specific contexts of historical victimization (Pearl Harbor) and harm-doing (Hiroshima and Nagasaki), finding that in-group superiority was a predictor of reactions to historical in-group harm-doing (justification, emotional reactions, importance of events), whereas centrality was a predictor of reactions to historical in-group victimization.
To investigate how defensive motivations would affect patterns of language use, the authors compared narratives of personal transgressions (about hurting someone) against a set of narratives about making someone happy. Compared to the happy stories, transgression narratives were more likely to describe actions occurring without deliberate guidance or intention. Length in word count did not vary, but transgression narratives had shorter sentences, especially in the sections describing the transgression and its consequences. They had longer introductions, presumably to explain background and mitigating circumstances. Transgression narratives featured the emotions and thoughts of the narrator significantly more than did narratives of making someone happy (which focused heavily on the target’s feelings), and they used more adverbs and similar words to emphasize the narrator’s emotions. Transgression narratives had fewer specific details but more (ostensibly) exact quotations.
Videotaped oral testimony of Holocaust survivors documents the extended (disjointed) memories of individuals who suffered through the industrial cruelty of the Third Reich. This testimony is studied cognitively in an effort to understand memory for atrocity and to characterize the enduring influences of such memory on the lives of the survivors. Unlike the topographic summaries of trauma in large correlational studies or the distant approximations in the laboratory, qualitative analysis of Holocaust testimony discloses what lies underneath -or inside: the phenomenology of the tormented. Drawin., on close observation of this testimony, this article examines how atrocity is remembered and how it is communicated to others. Most notably, the testimony reveals two levels of representation: core memory and narrative memory. Core memory consists of representations of the original phenomenal experience-vivid perceptual images, deeply felt emotions, and bodily sensations-which are then integrated into episodic narratives, creating memory's second level. The core memories of atrocity are extraordinarily persistent-recent memories do not weaken or conceal them, and time does not diminish their potency. To convey Holocaust memory now, some survivors call upon narrative conventions, applying archetypal images or referring to Holocaust stories already told. Other survivors avoid specifics, partly out of concern for the listener. Still others translate their private memories of horror into the public domain. In such cases, narrating the traumatic events ascribes meaning not to the past suffering and not to the memories themselves but to the function of memory. No longer meant to be hidden, memory is then meant to be communicated: to educate others and to document the lives of those who were murdered.
To study how roles shape the construction of narrative accounts, participants read a story while identifying with its victim or perpetrator and then retold the story in their own words. In Study 2, participants told the story twice, the second time after a 3-to 5-day retention interval. In Study 3, some participants were given instructions to tell as accurate a story as possible. In all three studies, victims and perpetrators distorted to about the same extent, significantly more than control participants and especially by selective omission of uncongenial facts. Specific distortions suggested self-serving, role-based motivations. Perpetrators embellished mitigating circumstances and their own benevolent actions while omitting facts that emphasized severity and responsibility. Victims concentrated on details that described the severity of the offense and downplayed the perpetrator's positive actions.