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Each year, people visit museums and memorial sites as part of educational interventions organized 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.

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