- Jacqueline Beck
- Investigating children’s tendency to place blame on the victim
- Psychology
Describe
your research
experience
We hypothesized that providing additional, potentially negative information about the victim would lead to higher tendency to victim blame than conditions without an additional information (baseline) and with additional irrelevant information.
Do children also victim blame? For the past decades, the victim blaming literature investigated why adults may have the tendency to place blame on the victim. However, to our knowledge, the phenomenon has yet to be studied with American children. In this study, we propose to investigate whether children also victim blame like adults do. We hypothesized that providing additional, potentially negative information about the victim would lead to higher tendency to victim blame than conditions without an additional information (baseline) and with additional irrelevant information. We read vignettes to forty-two 4.5- to 11-year-old children (Mage=7.2 years, SD=1.94) and measured children’s beliefs about the victim. There was a significant difference only between the scores for negative information condition (M=1.21, SD=1.16) and the scores for baseline condition (M=0.71, SD=0.92); t=-2.11, P=0.04. Also, the average of the negative information condition was higher than the baseline and irrelevant information condition, supporting our hypothesis. These findings suggest that children may also have the tendency to place blame on the victim.
As one of the recipient's of OUR's Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowships (2016), the results of Jacqueline's research can be found here.