What are the psychological processes behind victim blaming?
London-based forensic psychiatrist Dr Sohom Das has a YouTube channel called A Psych for Sore Minds, where he covers a range of mental health and crime topics alongside his practice.
In the NHS doctor’s broadcasts, he discusses what he has learned from some of the cases he has come across.
In a recent video Do bad things only happen to bad people? he addressed the topic of why some people get blamed.
According to the American Psychological Association (APA), victim blaming can help people understand the world, and in some ways make it feel like a more rational place.
According to forensic psychiatrist Dr. Sohom Das (photo), there is a specific theory that explains why people are often blamed
The APA explains: ‘It is a social psychological phenomenon in which individuals or groups try to cope with the bad things that have happened to others by blaming the victim for the trauma or tragedy.
Victim blaming serves to create psychological distance between the accuser and the victim, can rationalize the inability to intervene if the accuser were a bystander, and creates a psychological defense for the accuser against feelings of vulnerability.”
The reason people believe bad things happen to bad people, Dr. Das explained, is due to a phenomenon called the Just World Hypothesis.
In the video the psychiatrist explains the theory and how it works.
He says, “So many people unconsciously believe in a just world in which good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people.”
This, he explains, then leads people to think that if something bad happens, it is logically deserved.
Or as Dr. Das explains: ‘So this leads to a kind of incorrect attribution of blame to the victim in a negative situation.
“So basically saying that if something bad happened, she should be blamed for it somehow.”
The Just World Hypothesis is ‘based on the idea that the world is ‘a fair and orderly place where what happens to people is generally what they deserve’
The theory was first proposed by a Canadian psychologist named Melvin J. Lerner.
As the APA explains, it is based on the idea that the world is “a fair and orderly place, where what happens to people is generally what they deserve.”
In other words, it says, “bad things happen to bad people, and good things happen to good people.”
The decision concludes with the following words: ‘This view allows an individual to view his physical and social environment as if it were stable and predictable, but may, for example, result in the belief that the innocent victim of an accident or attack on the must somehow be responsible for or deserve it.”
Dr. Sohom Das can be found at Tweet, InstagramAnd TikTokas well as YouTube.