V.

In the 1960s, psychologist Melvin Lerner noticed something unsettling: when people witnessed innocent people suffering, sympathy wasn't always their response. Sometimes they decided the victim must have deserved it. Lerner eventually gave this disturbing instinct a name: the "belief in a just world"—our tendency to want life to operate according to a comforting equation. Good things happen to good people. Bad things happen to bad people. But there was a problem. If an innocent person could be assaulted, ruined, abused or humiliated through no fault of their own, then the world suddenly became frighteningly unpredictable. So people found another explanation. Maybe she shouldn't have gone there. Maybe she drank too much. Maybe her clothes sent the wrong message. Maybe she should have known better. The questions sounded like attempts to understand what happened. Psychologically, they could serve another purpose: creating distance between ourselves and the victim. If *she* made a mistake, then perhaps we can avoid making it—and remain safe. Researchers later found this pattern in studies involving sexual assault. In one 1976 experiment, participants judged an identical rape scenario differently depending upon whether the woman was described as a Catholic nun, a social worker or a topless-bottomless dancer. The dancer was assigned the greatest responsibility when she knew her attacker. Later experiments even found a woman's clothing could influence how much observers blamed her. That may be the most uncomfortable part of the Just World Hypothesis. Victim-blaming can masquerade as morality, caution and common sense when underneath it lies something much more primitive: fear. Because admitting that terrible things sometimes happen to people who did nothing to deserve them requires accepting something humans have spent centuries trying desperately not to believe. Sometimes there is no behavior that guarantees safety. © Women In World History #archaeohistories