The Psychology of Victim-Blaming
Kayliegh Roberts

Victim-blaming is many things but a few measurable elements of it is the treatment of the victim as somehow contaminated, and second-guessing the victim's choices that led to their becoming a victim. The idea here is that "there must have been something" that the victim did (or didn't do) that made them into the victim (of a crime, or an insult, or some other misfortune). The tendency to do this is part related to the "just world hypothesis", which says that bad things don't happen to people who don't deserve them. Another part seems to be the fear of becoming a victim yourself-- if you imagine that there was something else that the victim could have done, you can imagine that you yourself would do add that extra layer of protection and therefore avoid becoming another victim.

Laura Niemi and Liane Young are two psychologists who have studied the dynamics of victim-blaming through a series of studies. In one, subjects were given a story about a date-rape scenario. In some, the focus of the story was the eventual victim. In others, the focus of the story was the eventual rapist. Simple sentence structure was changed, like making the rapist the subject of sentences or altering the sentences to make the victim the subject, and through using the passive voice. The interesting outcome was that when the focus of the story was on the victim, people responded by asserting that there was something she could have done differently. When the focus of the story was more on the perpetrator, these kinds of alternate things the victim could have done diminish and the perpetrator is given more of the blame. One takeaway might be that despite wanting to tell the victim's story to gain sympathy, it might also trigger the victim-blaming response by making the victim the focus of the story and reducing the agency of the perpetrator.

Niemi and Young also found that moral reasoning revolves around two axes (at least in this context): the binding or the individualizing. The binding tends to look at group interests, while the individualizing tends to look at fairness to an individual. Interestingly, the individualizing pole is less likely to victim blame than the binding one.