Why Do Observers Sometimes Blame People Who Suffer?

When someone suffers a severe misfortune through no apparent fault of their own, observers may do more than sympathise. They sometimes ask, “What did that person do wrong?” One influence can be belief in a just world: the wish to see the world as broadly orderly, with effort rewarded and outcomes matched to conduct. Innocent suffering threatens that expectation. If the outcome cannot be changed, interpreting the suffering as deserved can make the world feel predictable again.

In a classic 1966 experiment, Lerner and Simmons had 72 female university students watch a peer who appeared to receive electric shocks after mistakes in a learning task. The situation was staged. When observers believed they were powerless to intervene and would continue watching her suffer, their evaluation of her became more negative. The researchers proposed that devaluing a victim can sometimes help preserve a sense that the world is just.

The study is old, used a narrow sample and relied on a deceptive scenario that would now raise substantial ethical concerns. It cannot establish a fixed response across all people and misfortunes. Later reviews indicate that just-world beliefs are related to evaluations of victims, but effects vary with information about responsibility, similarity, threat, culture and the event itself. Just-world thinking is not the only route to victim blaming.

The central point is not that every judgement of responsibility is biased. One useful check is to ask whether the same facts would produce the same judgement if the person were someone we cared about. Misfortune alone proves neither guilt nor complete innocence. Psychology warns us not to invent a cause of blame merely to restore our own sense of order.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/5969146/

https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.131.1.128