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

Background: 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. Method: 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. Results: 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. Conclusions: 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.