Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology, Vol 30(3), Aug 2024, 284-298; doi:10.1037/pac0000741
How people perceive social norms plays a vital role in conflict dynamics. Whereas most previous studies on social norms have focused on people’s perceptions of others’ beliefs and behaviors, the role of emotional social influence in conflict transformation has thus far been less studied. Yet, emotion norms may also be important, considering that it is well established that how people feel about the opponent group strongly shapes their conflict-related attitudes and behaviors. In this study, based on an original survey conducted in Israel in 2022 (N = 620), we examine how people perceive emotion norms—that is, the perceived prevalence of emotions felt toward the opponent group among one’s group members—and how these emotion norms relate to policy attitudes. We measured the perception of emotion norms in two reference groups, that is, one’s national (Israeli Jews) and political (left/center/right) group, for six emotions felt toward the opponent group (i.e., Palestinians): hate, anger, fear, empathy, hope, and guilt. Our results show that emotion norms are related to policy attitudes directly and indirectly via personal emotions. However, they show that the impact of emotion norms depends on the reference group, where the emotion norms in one’s political group are more strongly and consistently related to policy support than emotion norms in one’s nation. Overall, this study demonstrates the important role of emotion norms in shaping conflict-related attitudes and suggests that we need to move beyond the predominant focus on personally experienced emotions in the literature on conflict resolution. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)