Page 341 - The Social Animal

Prejudice 323

majority, empathy does not come easily. They may sympathize and
wish that it weren’t so, but frequently a hint of self-righteousness may
nevertheless creep into their attitudes, producing a tendency to lay
the blame on the victim. This may take the form of the “well-
deserved reputation.” It goes something like this: “If the Jews have
been victimized throughout their history, they must have been doing
something wrong” or “If that woman got raped, she must have been
doing something provocative” or “If those people [African Ameri-
cans, Latinos, Native Americans, gay people] don’t want to get into
trouble, why don’t they just . . . [stay out of the headlines, keep their
mouths shut, don’t go where they’re not wanted].” Such a suggestion
constitutes a demand that the outgroup conform to standards more
stringent than those set for the majority.
Ironically, this tendency to blame victims for their victimization,
attributing their predicaments to their own personalities and disabil-
ities, is often motivated by a desire to see the world as a just place.
46
As Melvin Lerner and his colleagues have shown, people tend to
assign personal responsibility for any inequitable outcome that is
otherwise difficult to explain. For example, if two people work
equally hard on the same task and, by a flip of a coin, one receives a
sizable reward and the other receives nothing, most observers will
rate the unlucky person as having worked less hard. Similarly, nega-
tive attitudes toward the poor—including blaming them for their
own plight—are more prevalent among individuals who believe most
strongly that the world is a just place. Apparently, we find it fright-
47
ening to think about living in a world where people, through no fault
of their own, can be deprived of what they deserve or need, be it
equal pay for equal work or the basic necessities of life. By the same
token, if 6 million Jews are exterminated for no apparent reason, it is
somehow comforting to believe they might have done something to
warrant such treatment.*
Further understanding of the phenomenon of blaming the vic-
tim comes from Baruch Fischhoff’s work on the hindsight bias, 48 a
phenomenon we discussed in Chapters 1 and 4. As you may recall,

*The astute reader may have noticed that this is a milder form of our tendency
to derogate a person we have victimized. In Chapters 5 and 6, we saw that, when
one person hurts another, the aggressor tends to derogate the target, turn the victim
into a nonperson, and hurt that other person again. Now we see that, if one person
notices that another person has gotten the short end of the stick, he or she some-
how feels the victim must have done something to deserve it.