Whenever there is a news report of a criminal act the report will always be accompanied by some story of how the accused was victimized at some point in their lives. Child abuse, dysfunctional family or bad relationship, you name it there will always be some sort of justification.
Now of course this isn’t purposely intended by those reporting the story, it’s simple human nature to try to figure out what caused the criminal to carry out their act. But there appears to be a subconscious element to all this. Most people are fair and decent minded, so when they hear of a crime taking place it’ll make them wonder what motivated the crime. When there is no real defense the alternative is to victimize the criminal somewhat which helps us digest and understand how someone could do something bad. The following study may explain our subconscious behavior.
Great works and praiseworthy behavior may bring respect and admiration, but these won’t help us to escape blame when we do something wrong, says a new study by researchers at the University of Maryland and Harvard University. To do that, the researchers say, one needs to be a victim not a hero!
In the study, participants responded to a number of scenarios that mirrored real-life moral transgressions, from stealing money to harming someone. Results revealed that, no matter how many previous good deeds someone had done, they received just as much blame — if not more — than someone with a less heroic background.
“People may come down even harder on someone like the Dalai Lama, than they do on ‘Joe Blow,’ said author Kurt Gray, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Maryland.” However, in our research those who have suffered in the past received significantly less blame — even if such suffering was both totally unrelated to the misdeed and long since past.”
The article, titled “To Escape Blame, Don’t be a Hero — be a Victim” is published in the March issue of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. The findings are based on three experiments conducted by Gray and Daniel Wegner, professor of psychology at Harvard University.
“Our research suggests that morality is not like some kind of cosmic bank, where you can deposit good deeds and use them to offset future misdeeds,” said Gray, who directs the Mind Perception and Morality Lab at the University of Maryland. “Instead, people ignore heroic pasts — or even count them against you — when assigning blame.”
Gray suggests that the explanation for these findings is our tendency to divide the world up into moral agents — those who do good and evil — and moral patients — those who receive good or evil. “Psychologically, the perceived distance between a hero and a villain is quite small, whereas there’s a wide gap between a villain and a victim. This means that heroes are easily recast as evil doers, whereas it’s very hard to turn a victim into a villain.”
You can read more about this study here.
Now to get a little political: This may also explain president Obama’s blame Bush strategy. Not that he has anything to play the hero with, but playing the victim helps him escape blame.
