Can visiting genocide memorials make you more empathic?

Each year, people visit museums and memorial sites as part of educational interventions organised around the remembrance of a genocide or an atrocity. Many schools visit a concentration camp as part of Holocaust education, such as Auschwitz-Birkenau. Others travel to memorial sites associated with other genocides, such as the massacre of Muslim men fleeing Srebrenica in Bosnia or the Tuol Sleng genocide museum in Cambodia.

Two important goals for such education are to foster empathy towards the victims and to increase students’ personal identification with them as a group. In this context, empathy is the ability to feel with the victims and to be able to take their perspective .

But what does science say about the effect of visiting genocidal memorial sites on empathy and identification with a victim group? Our study, published in Holocaust Studies in July, sheds some light on the question.

The science of empathy

While we may justly think of empathy as a personality feature, it is also a capacity that can be activated through social experiences. When we identify with a group of victims we perceive a “we” connecting us with the members of the group.

We do know that both empathy and identification with another group have been shown to foster positive relations with others.

They are also important qualities that can protect people threatened by genocide. Empathy was an important factor among those who helped persecuted people to survive during the Holocaust and the genocide in Rwanda, for example.

Evidence suggests that Israeli high-school students visiting Auschwitz-Birkenau may increase their empathy towards Palestinians. That’s if they initially are already somewhat positive towards Palestinians in principle and if they are prepared to see suffering in universal rather than national terms.

It has also been shown that groups of Polish students visiting Auschwitz-Birkenau increased their identification with Jews as a group before and after visiting the concentration camp.

Clear evidence

In our recent study, we investigated 143 high-school students from Malmö in Sweden, of which 46 took a short course on the Holocaust, including a trip to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

We collected data both before and after the trip. We measured two facets of empathy in the students, “empathic concern” (such as “I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me”) and “perspective taking” (such as “Before criticising somebody, I try to imagine how I would feel if I were in their place”).

We also measured to what extent they identified with Jews as a group by ratings of how close they felt.

The results for this group were then compared with responses from a control group of students who did not participate in the course or trip to Auschwitz.

We found that the Holocaust education and trip increased the students’ preparedness to identify with and take the perspective of Jews compared to those who didn’t go. However, both groups showed similar amount of empathic concern.

Looking more closely at the change registered among students after the trip, we also found that a feeling of increased closeness to Jews as a group was related to increased perspective taking.

Our work suggests a role of genocide education in fostering a broad empathic understanding of a victim group’s life and culture. This can provide important stimulation for students to put themselves in the shoes of an often “otherised” group, whose experience of hate and violence can be appreciated as if it is known from the inside.

This is clearly important at a time when both Holocaust denial and Islamophobia are rising.

Remaining mysteries

There is a great need for more research on moral education interventions that involves a site or museum visit. Evaluating how this education works, and which aspects that have the intended effects, is of key importance. Cutting edge scientific methods, such as virtual reality, are now just beginning to make a difference to education in this area.

We will next be working to pinpoint how trips to sites of atrocity affect students’ moral values, attitudes or behaviour.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.