NCJ Number
72095
Date Published
1976
Length
141 pages
Annotation
Negative attitudes toward victims were examined in two experimental situations which manipulated conditions under which female college students reacted to a videotape of a girl who appeared to be receiving electric shocks.
Abstract
To test the defensive attribution theory which asserts that observers avoid the upsetting thought that they could become victims by derogating the victim, 71 female college students watched a videotape of a girl who appeared to be receiving electric shocks from a colleague as part of a learning experiment. All subjects expected to participate in the same experiment, but some thought they would not be shocked, others expected to be shocked, and a third group did not know what would happen to them. In addition, the hypothesis that similar subjects would be more positive in their attitudes toward victims than dissimilar subjects was tested by varying the number of preferences the subject was led to believe she shared with the victim. When the tape was finished, subjects completed questionnaires evaluating the film's participants and assessing other reactions to the experimental situation. Analysis of this data showed that the subjects who were most vulnerable and expected to be shocked evaluated the victim most negatively, suggesting that denigration of victims may be motivated by a desire to avoid the stress produced by empathizing with a victim's plight. A second experiment was conducted to see if denigration would not occur when an alternative means of dissociation was available. Using the same procedures followed in the first experiment, some of the 56 female college students selected were given additional instructions which emphasized their roles as detached observers. The victim in the tape was shocked on a random basis, not is response to learning performance as in the first experiment. However, the results did not confirm the second hypothesis, but only showed a tendency for subjects who shared the victim's fate to evaluate her more positively than those who did not. The study also suggested that positive identification with a victim can benefit the observer, even though it produces stress, whereas when the victim is dissimilar, an observer views the situation as irrelevant. The appendixes contain the materials used in both experiments, including questionnaires and statistical tables. References are provided. (Author abstract modified)