Why Society Blames Victims, According to Science Stephania Pappas - LiveScience
go to original July 13, 2016

A woman at a party has too many drinks too quickly and another partygoer sexually assaults her while she’s unconscious. A black man outside a convenience store has a gun in his pocket when police pin him down on the pavement and shoot him.

Who’s to blame?

The way you answer that question may depend on how heavily you weigh two types of moral values, a new study finds. In experiments, researchers found that people whose values focus on reducing harm and caring for everyone are likely to blame the perpetrators: the rapist or the police. In contrast, people who adhere more closely to values like loyalty, purity and obedience to authority are more likely to blame the victims.

This difference holds after accounting for politics and demographic factors, said study researcher Laura Niemi, a postdoctoral researcher in psychology at Harvard University in Massachusetts. It’s also equally true both for sex crimes, in which problems in securing convictions are often traced to victim blaming, and for crimes of a nonsexual nature.

“We’re finding it across victimization in general,” Niemi told Live Science. “So there’s something about just being in that victim role that’s what’s important.”

Read the rest at The Huffington Post

Photo: NewAge

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