How appraisals of an in-group's collective history shape collective identity and action: Evidence in relation to African identity.

This research tested the impact of how group members appraise their collective history on in-group identification and group-based action in the African context. Across three experiments (Ns = 950; 270; and 259) with Nigerian participants, we tested whether the effect of historical representations-specifically the valence of the in-group's collective history-on in-group engagement, in turn, depends on whether that history is also appraised as subjectively important. In Study 1, findings from exploratory moderated-mediation analyses indicated that the appraised negative valence of African history was associated with an increase in identification and group-based action when African history was appraised as unimportant (history-as-contrast).