hey I just thought of you while reading my textbook (strange).
"Most of us are very good at reconstructing situations after the fact to support our belief in a just world. It simplye requires making a dispositional attribution--to the victim--and not a situational one--to the scary, random events that can happen to anyone at anytime. In a fascinating experiment, college students who were provided with a description of a young woman's friendly behavior toward a man judged that behavior as completely appropriate (Janoff-Bulman, Timko, & Carlo, 1985). Another group of students was given the same description, plus the information that the encounter ended with the young woman being raped by the man. This group rated the young woman's behavior as inappropriate; she was judged as having brought the rape on herself.
Such findings are not limited to American college students reading hypothetical cases. In a survey conducted in England, a striking 33 percent of the respondents believed that victims of rape are almost always to blame for it (Wagstaff, 1982).
How can we account for such harsh attributions? Most of us find it frightening to think that we live in a world where people, through no fault of their own, can be raped, discriminated against, deprived of equal pay for equal work or denied the basic necessities of life. The irony is overwhelming: Such thinking makes the world seem safer to us"
that is all.
"Most of us are very good at reconstructing situations after the fact to support our belief in a just world. It simplye requires making a dispositional attribution--to the victim--and not a situational one--to the scary, random events that can happen to anyone at anytime. In a fascinating experiment, college students who were provided with a description of a young woman's friendly behavior toward a man judged that behavior as completely appropriate (Janoff-Bulman, Timko, & Carlo, 1985). Another group of students was given the same description, plus the information that the encounter ended with the young woman being raped by the man. This group rated the young woman's behavior as inappropriate; she was judged as having brought the rape on herself.
Such findings are not limited to American college students reading hypothetical cases. In a survey conducted in England, a striking 33 percent of the respondents believed that victims of rape are almost always to blame for it (Wagstaff, 1982).
How can we account for such harsh attributions? Most of us find it frightening to think that we live in a world where people, through no fault of their own, can be raped, discriminated against, deprived of equal pay for equal work or denied the basic necessities of life. The irony is overwhelming: Such thinking makes the world seem safer to us"
that is all.