Fault To A Rate Victim:study

3 Pages 705 Words

Attribution biases are the general rules of attributing cause to behavior. We studied multiple facets of this bizarre social phenomenon and I was pleasantly surprised to stumble across the “belief in a just world” fallacy proposed in an earlier lecture. You taught us that when we hold the belief that we do in fact live in a just world that we tend to believe that people get what they deserve, and will make causal attributions of others based on the consequences produced by their behavior and their character credibility. We also learned how to discern personal attribution from situational behavior, and what this article illustrates is the experiment was founded on the notion that people would attribute more causality to the victim of a rape if she were viewed as a more respectable person in the effort to compensate with the “un-justness” of the incident. This intrinsic dilemma frustrates me and I will rant in a few paragraphs.
The study was conducted by Cathaleene Jones and Elliot Aronson. Their hypothesis was a socially respectable person is seen as more at fault in a crime in which he was the victim. The put forth a case description of a rape attempt and assault in manipulated circumstances that included a virgin, a married woman, and a divorcee. The circumstances included the women’s sexual status and the effect the incident had on it. Then a survey was given to another sample in attempt to find a general estimate of how credible people view a virgin, a married woman, and a divorcee. The survey showed that a virgin received the most respectability followed by the married woman and then the divorcee.
The findings were as follows: when the victim was a divorcee the mean attribution of fault was less than when the victim was either a virgin or married. Here is where I start to mind myself at a roadblock. When I first read the article I assumed that a divorcee would be more at fault for rape because of her “im...