The Psychology of Victim-Blaming [Archive.org URL]

“I think the biggest factor that promotes victim-blaming is something called the just world hypothesis,” says Sherry Hamby, a professor of psychology at the University of the South and founding editor of the APA’s Psychology of Violence journal. “It’s this idea that people deserve what happens to them. There’s just a really strong need to believe that we all deserve our outcomes and consequences.”

Hamby explains that this desire to see the world as just and fair may be even stronger among Americans, who are raised in a culture that promotes the American Dream and the idea that we all control our own destinies.

“In other cultures, where sometimes because of war or poverty or maybe sometimes even just because of a strong thread of fatalism in the culture, it’s a lot better recognized that sometimes bad things happen to good people,” she says. “But as a general rule, Americans have a hard time with the idea that bad things happen to good people.”

Holding victims responsible for their misfortune is partially a way to avoid admitting that something just as unthinkable could happen to you—even if you do everything “right.”

“In my experience, people blame victims so that they can continue to feel safe themselves.”

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Niemi and Young identified two primary sets of moral values: binding values and individualizing values. While everyone has a mix of the two, people who exhibit stronger binding values tend to favor protecting a group or the interests of a team as a whole, whereas people who exhibit stronger individualizing values are more focused on fairness and preventing harm to an individual.

Niemi explains that a higher endorsement of binding values reliably predicted stigmatizing attitudes about victims—in the context of both sexual and non-sexual crimes. People who favored binding values were more likely to see victims as blameworthy, while people who favored individualizing values were more likely to be sympathetic to victims.

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Niemi and Young manipulated the sentence structure in the vignettes, changing who was the subject of the majority of sentences, the victim or the perpetrator. Some groups were given vignettes with the victim in the subject position (e.g. “Lisa was approached by Dan”) and others were given vignettes with the perpetrator in the subject position (e.g. “Dan approached Lisa”).

If coverage focuses on the victim’s experience and story—even in a sympathetic way—Niemi and Young’s research suggests it might increase the likelihood of victim-blaming.

When the perpetrator was the subject of the sentence, participants’ “ratings of victim blame and victim responsibility went down significantly,” Niemi says. “And when we asked them explicitly how could this outcome have been different and then we just gave them an empty text box and they could fill in whatever they wanted, their actual references to victim’s actions—things like, ‘Oh, she could have called a cab’—they decreased. So they actually had a harder time coming up with things that victims could have done and were focusing less on the victim’s behavior in general. That suggests that how we present these cases in text can change how people think about victims.”

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Niemi explains that it can be hard, especially for the loved ones of perpetrators, to reconcile the fact that someone they know so well and see as such a good person could commit a crime that they see as monstrous. In some cases, this might lead to over-empathizing with perpetrators and focusing on their other achievements or attributes, as with coverage of the Stanford rape case, in which Brock Turner was sometimes described as star swimmer instead of as an accused rapist. This is another kind of defense mechanism, one that leads those close to perpetrators to either deny or diminish their crime in order to avoid dealing with the difficult cognitive process of accepting that they were capable of such a thing.