On the psychology of the belief in a just world: exploring experiential and rationalistic paths to victim blaming.
This article examines why people may blame innocent victims of robbery or sexual assault. We propose that in experiential mind-sets associative links are formed between the victim and the negative event. As the creation of such links is independent of explicit beliefs, people in experiential mind-sets produce negative reactions to the victim independent of their just-world beliefs. Rationalistic mind-sets, however, instigate propositional and consistency-based reasoning. For people who strongly endorse just-world beliefs (such as people who have strong predispositions to believe that the world is just or whose just-world beliefs have been threatened strongly), learning about an innocent victim creates a logically inconsistent system of beliefs. This inconsistency can be resolved by blaming the victim. For people who only weakly endorse just-world beliefs, there is no inconsistency in the first place and therefore no need to blame the victim. Two experiments support this line of reasoning.
van den Bos
Kees
K
Department of Social and Organizational Psychology, Utrecht University, Utrecht, the Netherlands. k.vandenbos@uu.nl
Maas
Marjolein
M
D000739:Anecdotes as Topic; D001290:Attitude; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009426:Netherlands; D011908:Rationalization; D012539:Scapegoating; D012935:Social Justice / Q000523:psychology*