Making Sense of Injustice: Benign and Derogatory Reactions to Innocent Victims

Abstract

People are confronted with injustice and innocent victims on a regular basis. Reactions toward victims can range from going to great lengths to help or support the victims in order to alleviate their ill fate to harsh negative reactions often resulting in blaming and derogating the victims for what happened to them. In my dissertation, I addressed two questions regarding social justice and reactions toward victims of injustice. Why do people blame innocent victims? And how can we transform derogatory reactions into more benevolent reactions? Previous research has shown that victim blaming and derogation paradoxically stem from people’s belief in a just world (BJW). Innocent victims threaten the BJW and victim blaming and derogation help restore the belief. Research even showed that negative reactions are enhanced when the victim is similar to the observer, presumably because victim similarity enhances experienced BJW threat. I added to these findings by showing that perpetrator similarity influences victim blaming and derogation in a similar manner. Hence, proximity of the injustice in a broader sense seems to influence experienced BJW threat and subsequent reactions to resolve the threat. In subsequent studies, I showed that in today’s future-oriented society people experience more personal uncertainty. To deal with these aversive feelings, people hold on to the BJW more strongly and victim blaming and derogation are enhanced. Together, these lines of research help gain progressive insights into the psychological underpinnings of the paradoxical negative reactions toward innocent victims of injustice. The second part of the dissertation was devoted to incorporating the more benign reactions toward innocent victims of injustice that do occur in real life, but that have received only minor attention in social justice research.I investigated the processes that influence whether people are more prone to make sense of this injustice by either negative or positive reactions. My results indicate that people become spontaneously avoidance motivated and self-focused, when confronted with innocent victims of injustice. These factors make derogatory reactions toward victims a likely strategy to make sense of the injustice. However, these reactions can be counteracted and may even be transformed in more benign ways of dealing with injustice, such as support and help for the victims involved, by instilling an other-focus or an approach motivation. With the research presented in this dissertation, I showed that making sense of injustice can be accomplished both by benign and derogatory reactions to innocent victims.