New Framework Explains Why Collective Trauma Can Fuel Revenge or Solidarity

When a group has been harmed, the popular assumption is that violence begets violence: people who see their nation, ethnic community, or religious group as a victim of aggression will want revenge, or will endorse preemptive force in the name of self-defense. Yet history repeatedly shows the opposite as well. Survivors of genocide, colonialism, and mass oppression have organized campaigns of nonviolence, extended solidarity to other persecuted groups, and built movements for reconciliation. A major new review published in Nature Reviews Psychology argues that the difference lies not in the violence itself but in how people make sense of it — in the specific beliefs they form about their group’s collective victimization, and in the coping strategies those beliefs set in motion.

The review, led by Johanna Ray Vollhardt of Clark University together with Hu Young Jeong of the University of Virginia, Zsolt P. Szabó of Corvinus University Budapest and Eötvös Loránd University, and Khaled Elazab of Clark University, synthesizes decades of research from social psychology, clinical and counselling psychology, liberation psychology, and adjacent disciplines. Its central contribution is a unifying structure: an appraisal–coping framework that organizes the sprawling literature on collective victimization beliefs into the phases long used to understand individual stress — primary appraisal, secondary appraisal, coping efforts, and coping outcomes. By mapping group-level beliefs onto this sequence, the authors offer a technically precise way to predict when collective victimization produces destructive consequences and when it instead gives rise to constructive ones.

The framework begins with primary appraisal, the initial assessment of whether an event threatens the group or offers an opportunity. Applied collectively, this stage encompasses beliefs about the severity, intentionality, and temporal scope of harm. A community may appraise a massacre as an existential threat to its survival, as a historical injustice that demands redress, or as a completed chapter of the past. Each reading carries distinct emotional signatures. Appraisals of ongoing threat generate fear and collective angst — the dread that the group’s future vitality is in jeopardy — whereas appraisals of past injustice can fuel anger, humiliation, or a sense of moral obligation. Research on historical trauma among Indigenous peoples, on the siege mentality documented in intractable conflicts, and on conspiracy beliefs as adaptations to historical trauma all illustrate how primary appraisals shape the psychological terrain on which later responses unfold.

Secondary appraisal follows: the evaluation of what the group can do about the harm. Here the framework incorporates beliefs about collective power, agency, and efficacy. Groups that perceive themselves as powerless may retreat into defensive victimhood, emphasizing their suffering to claim moral standing they cannot secure through strength. Groups that perceive latent strength may convert victimization appraisals into challenge rather than threat, a shift that studies on historical collective trauma suggest can transform intergroup dynamics. The review highlights findings among Black Americans, Kurdish communities, and other groups whose beliefs about ingroup resilience and resistance — the conviction that ‘we have survived before and can resist again’ — operate as psychological resources rather than wounds. These secondary appraisals determine whether coping efforts take the form of avoidance, such as denial and defensive closure, or approach, such as justice-seeking, collective action, and outreach.

The third phase, coping efforts, is where the framework displays its greatest explanatory reach. The authors distinguish among a wide repertoire of strategies that victimized groups deploy, many of which were previously treated as isolated phenomena. Competitive victimhood — the struggle to establish that one’s own group suffered more than its adversary — emerges as an avoidance-oriented strategy that obstructs forgiveness and reconciliation, as demonstrated in studies of Israeli–Palestinian, Bosnian, and other post-conflict settings. By contrast, inclusive victim consciousness, the belief that one’s own suffering connects the group to other victimized groups rather than separating it from them, functions as an approach-oriented coping effort associated with support for refugees, willingness for intergroup contact, and peace activism. The review also integrates less-studied efforts such as acknowledgment-seeking, the pursuit of recognition from perpetrators and the international community, which experimental and survey research links to improved psychological well-being and greater readiness for compromise.

Critically, the framework treats these beliefs as multidimensional rather than binary. Earlier scholarship often contrasted a single ‘victim mentality’ with its absence, but the review draws on the authors’ own empirical work — including Q-methodology studies across five communities and surveys in Rwanda, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Northern Ireland, the Korean diaspora, and elsewhere — showing that people simultaneously hold multiple, sometimes contradictory victimization beliefs. A person may believe their group’s suffering was unique and unmatched while also feeling bound to other victims of history. The same historical memory can underwrite exclusive nationalism in one context and cosmopolitan solidarity in another, depending on which appraisals and coping pathways are activated. This complexity, the authors argue, is precisely what one-dimensional models have missed.

The consequences, or coping outcomes, span both individual and societal levels. At the individual level, chronic threat appraisals and avoidance coping are associated with heightened anxiety, depressive symptoms, and intergenerational transmission of trauma, patterns documented among Holocaust survivors’ descendants, Indigenous adolescents, Ukrainian Holodomor families, and refugee populations. Yet the review also catalogues constructive outcomes: posttraumatic growth after collective violence, altruism born of suffering, and radical hope — a culturally grounded orientation toward a better future even in revolting times. At the societal level, the same belief structures predict support for hostile policies such as population transfer and preemptive strikes on one hand, and for forgiveness, reparations, and joint political decision-making on the other. Recent meta-analytic work on collective victimhood beliefs and conflict-related attitudes confirms that these associations are robust across contexts, though their direction depends on which specific beliefs are measured.

The appraisal–coping lens also clarifies why interventions succeed or fail. Programs that reduce competitive victimhood by recategorizing adversaries into a common victim identity, narratives that frame historical trauma inclusively, moral-exemplar interventions highlighting figures who responded to injustice with principled resistance, and reconciliation radio dramas that encourage historical perspective-taking all work, in this framework’s terms, by shifting primary or secondary appraisals and by modeling approach-oriented coping. Conversely, commemorative practices that reinforce exclusive victimhood — such as memorial days that heighten affective polarization — can entrench threat appraisals even while strengthening ingroup cohesion. The framework thus gives practitioners a diagnostic vocabulary: identify which appraisal is dominant, which coping effort is being rewarded, and which outcome the belief structure is likely to produce.

The authors are careful to note the framework’s boundaries and the research agenda it implies. Much of the evidence remains correlational, drawn from self-report surveys in a limited set of conflict regions, and the field still lacks longitudinal designs tracking how appraisals evolve as violence unfolds or subsides. The review also stresses that coping with collective victimization cannot be reduced to individual adaptation: liberation psychology and decolonial scholarship remind researchers that oppression is structural, and that ‘coping’ in an unjust context may legitimately mean resistance rather than adjustment. Future work, the authors suggest, should examine within-group variation — how gender, generation, class, and intersectional identities shape whose victimization beliefs prevail — and should test the framework’s phases experimentally.

What emerges is a picture both sobering and hopeful. Collective victimization is neither a destiny of endless retaliation nor a guaranteed springboard to solidarity; it is a psychological process whose direction depends on appraisals of threat and agency, on the coping efforts communities can imagine and afford, and on the social and political environments that reward some beliefs while silencing others. By providing a common architecture for a fragmented literature, the review equips researchers, policymakers, and peacebuilders to ask a sharper question than ‘does trauma breed violence?’ — namely, which beliefs about victimhood, under which conditions, lead groups to lash out, and which lead them to reach out.

Subject of Research: An appraisal–coping framework explaining how collective victimization beliefs shape destructive and constructive group responses to violence

Article Title: An appraisal–coping framework of collective victimization beliefs and their consequences

Article References: Vollhardt, J. R., Jeong, H. Y., Szabó, Z. P., & Elazab, K. (2026). An appraisal–coping framework of collective victimization beliefs and their consequences. Nature Reviews Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44159-026-00610-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s44159-026-00610-w

Keywords: collective victimization, appraisal-coping framework, intergroup conflict, historical trauma, collective victimhood beliefs, reconciliation, inclusive victim consciousness, competitive victimhood, collective resilience, social psychology, peace psychology, Nature Reviews Psychology