TY  - JOUR
PY  - 2009//
TI  - On the Psychology of the Belief in a Just World: Exploring Experiential and Rationalistic Paths to Victim Blaming
JO  - Personality and social psychology bulletin
A1  - van den Bos, Kees
A1  - Maas, Marjolein
SP  - 1567
EP  - 1578
VL  - 35
IS  - 12
N2  - 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>
LA  - en
SN  - 0146-1672
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0146167209344628
ID  - ref1
ER  -