P
Parrtlord
Swallowed into the Abyss
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- Joined
- Nov 7, 2018
- Posts
- 2,163
I think when somebody give you advice, he or she is looking for the slightest excuse to call you a horrible person or a sexist.. Because it feels bad seeing a good person suffer or face hard times... It feels alot better if the person ''deserves'' it for being a bad person. After all, bad events could happen to us. Women or Men can treat us like shit for being ugly or other factors that you cannot control So, if you’re not terrified, ask yourself why?
If you're like most people, your answer is probably something like, “because it won’t happen to me.” But why wouldn’t it? Why wouldn't you be vulnerable to the same events that everyone else is?
This isn’t just speculation. In a classic experiment published in the Psychological Bulletin, Lerner and his colleague Carolyn Simmons provided evidence for this explanation of victim-blaming. In their study, a large sample of women were asked to watch through a video monitor as another person received a series of apparently painful electrical shocks. The women believed they were observing an experiment in human learning in which the person on the screen was receiving the shocks as punishment for her errors on a word-memorization task. Although they were led to believe that the victim was another participant like themselves, the person was actually an actor, so nobody was really harmed in the experiment. Not surprisingly, all of the participants were initially upset by the victim’s suffering. But this is where the experiment gets a bit more complicated: Some participants were offered the opportunity to compensate the victim by voting to stop punishing her errors with shocks, instead rewarding her with money when she got the answers right. That is, they were given the opportunity to restore justice, to make the world good again. A second group of participants were not given this opportunity; they were asked simply to sit and watch the victim get repeatedly shocked, with no way of remedying the situation. Afterward, all participants were asked to give their opinions of the victim. The results revealed striking differences between the two groups: Those who were given a chance to restore justice said they saw the victim as a good person. But those who were forced simply to watch the unjust situation unfold, ended up derogating the victim, seeing her as deserving her fate. In other words, because they weren’t able to actually bring about justice, they protected their view that the world was a fair place by coming to believe that the victim must somehow not be a good person. If she deserved the shocks, they could tell themselves, then the world was still fair.
So, our tendency to blame the victim is ultimately self-protective. It allows us to maintain our rosy worldview (BLUEPILL WORLDVIEW) and reassure ourselves that nothing bad will happen to us. The problem is that it sacrifices another person’s well-being for our own. It overlooks the reality that perpetrators are to blame for acts of crime and violence, not the victim.
SOURCE:https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1974-25169-001
If you're like most people, your answer is probably something like, “because it won’t happen to me.” But why wouldn’t it? Why wouldn't you be vulnerable to the same events that everyone else is?
This isn’t just speculation. In a classic experiment published in the Psychological Bulletin, Lerner and his colleague Carolyn Simmons provided evidence for this explanation of victim-blaming. In their study, a large sample of women were asked to watch through a video monitor as another person received a series of apparently painful electrical shocks. The women believed they were observing an experiment in human learning in which the person on the screen was receiving the shocks as punishment for her errors on a word-memorization task. Although they were led to believe that the victim was another participant like themselves, the person was actually an actor, so nobody was really harmed in the experiment. Not surprisingly, all of the participants were initially upset by the victim’s suffering. But this is where the experiment gets a bit more complicated: Some participants were offered the opportunity to compensate the victim by voting to stop punishing her errors with shocks, instead rewarding her with money when she got the answers right. That is, they were given the opportunity to restore justice, to make the world good again. A second group of participants were not given this opportunity; they were asked simply to sit and watch the victim get repeatedly shocked, with no way of remedying the situation. Afterward, all participants were asked to give their opinions of the victim. The results revealed striking differences between the two groups: Those who were given a chance to restore justice said they saw the victim as a good person. But those who were forced simply to watch the unjust situation unfold, ended up derogating the victim, seeing her as deserving her fate. In other words, because they weren’t able to actually bring about justice, they protected their view that the world was a fair place by coming to believe that the victim must somehow not be a good person. If she deserved the shocks, they could tell themselves, then the world was still fair.
So, our tendency to blame the victim is ultimately self-protective. It allows us to maintain our rosy worldview (BLUEPILL WORLDVIEW) and reassure ourselves that nothing bad will happen to us. The problem is that it sacrifices another person’s well-being for our own. It overlooks the reality that perpetrators are to blame for acts of crime and violence, not the victim.
SOURCE:https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1974-25169-001