@article{ref1,
title="On the Psychology of the Belief in a Just World: Exploring Experiential and Rationalistic Paths to Victim Blaming",
journal="Personality and social psychology bulletin",
year="2009",
author="van den Bos, Kees and Maas, Marjolein",
volume="35",
number="12",
pages="1567-1578",
abstract="This article examines why people may blame innocent victims of robbery or sexual assault. We propose that in experiential mind-sets associative links are formed between the victim and the negative event. As the creation of such links is independent of explicit beliefs, people in experiential mind-sets produce negative reactions to the victim independent of their just-world beliefs. Rationalistic mind-sets, however, instigate propositional and consistency-based reasoning. For people who strongly endorse just-world beliefs (such as people who have strong predispositions to believe that the world is just or whose just-world beliefs have been threatened strongly), learning about an innocent victim creates a logically inconsistent system of beliefs. This inconsistency can be resolved by blaming the victim. For people who only weakly endorse just-world beliefs, there is no inconsistency in the first place and therefore no need to blame the victim. Two experiments support this line of reasoning.<p /> <p>Language: en</p>",
language="en",
issn="0146-1672",
doi="10.1177/0146167209344628",
url="http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0146167209344628"
}