Antecedents of the attitude towards inter-group reconciliation in a setting of armed conflict

The concept of Reconciliation as applied to inter-group conflict has come into use only recently. Throughout the history of Psychology, Reconciliation was mostly understood at the individual and inter-personal level.

In the present study we shall analyse the roles played by trust, negotiating attitude, legitimacy and ethnocentric attitude over the attitude towards social reconciliation. To this end we studied a group of 188 Colombian civilians living under conditions of real socio-political conflict.

A path analysis was performed using the statistical program AMOS whose fit indexes indicate a good fit of the model and a variance of .36. The results show that the variables of trust, negotiating attitude and legitimacy have a significant and positive effect on the reconciliation variable, and significant negative effect on the ethnocentric attitude variable.

This study contributes to the integration of a number of variables that facilitate process of social reconciliation, as it explicitly deals with some of the perceptions, attitudes and beliefs which could change the course of a confrontation.