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On the Psychology of the Belief in a Just World: Exploring Experiential and Rationalistic Paths to Victim Blaming
Kees van den Bos, Dr.*
and
Marjolein Maas
* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: K.vandenBos{at}uu.nl.
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Abstract |
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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.
First published on September 2, 2009, doi:10.1177/0146167209344628
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 2009;35:1567.
A more recent version of this article appeared on December 1, 2009
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