The present study explores the role of linguistic compositional characteristics in
transmitting collective victimhood beliefs. Experimentally manipulated excerpts of
history textbooks were used to examine the perception of the victim position of national
outgroups and its intermediary social psychological processes with Hungarian (N =
415) and Finnish (N = 116) participants. The results reveal that the narrative composition
of the victimhood narrative had a significant effect on the perception of the target
groups' victimhood position. The evaluation of the groups changed according to which
variant of the story was introduced. The results demonstrate that the perception of
a perpetrator group can be changed purely by means of narrative construction and that
their actions can acquire a "victim tone". This effect is present in both the Hungarian
and Finnish samples, suggesting that narrating an event of victimhood has certain
universal characteristics, although their effect is partially dependent on the national-historical-cultural
context.
