Rev. Danny Fisher

Via the Allen Ginsberg Library at Naropa University: In a piece for his Department of Human Behavior column in the Washington Post, author Shankar Vedantam writes about “9/11, Iraq and the Desensitization of the Victimized.” Here’s a striking chunk:

Reminders of the Sept. 11 attacks seem to dull the responsibility that Americans feel for the harm caused by the botched U.S. war in Iraq, according to controlled experiments by social psychologists Michael J.A. Wohl and Nyla Branscombe.

In research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Wohl and Branscombe randomly divided volunteers into groups. One group was reminded of the terrorist attacks, while another was told about Nazi atrocities in Poland during World War II. A third group was reminded of the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The volunteers were then quizzed on their views about the Iraq war.

Volunteers reminded about the Sept. 11 attacks were less likely to perceive the distress the war has caused many Iraqis, and less likely to feel collective responsibility, compared with volunteers told about the tragedy in Poland.