I’ve long been skeptical of what psychologists call the Just World Hypothesis. A standard statement:
[T]he just-world hypothesis is the tendency to attribute consequences to—or expect consequences as the result of—a universal force that restores moral balance. This belief generally implies the existence of cosmic justice, destiny, divine providence, desert, stability, and/or order, and is often associated with a variety of fundamental fallacies, especially in regards to rationalizing people’s suffering on the grounds that they “deserve” it.
One of the main forms of (alleged) evidence in favor of the Just World Hypothesis is that people derogate and blame the victims of crimes. But I’ve simply never noticed this in real life. All I’ve seen, rather, is that people claim that other people derogate and blame the victims of crimes.
To explore these doubts, I ran three Twitter polls. Yes, I know this is far from decisive evidence. But I still trust it more than many of the studies that got the Just World Hypothesis off the ground.
I started with two paired survey questions:
In the typical U.S. crime, how blameworthy is the VICTIM?
— Bryan Caplan (@bryan_caplan) August 2, 2019
In the typical U.S. crime, how blameworthy is the PERPETRATOR?
— Bryan Caplan (@bryan_caplan) August 2, 2019
Responses match my expectations. Virtually no one thinks that crime victims are “highly” or even “somewhat” blameworthy. Almost everyone thinks that crime perpetrators are “highly” or at least “somewhat” culpable.
My last survey zoomed out to the Big Question:
How just is the world?
— Bryan Caplan (@bryan_caplan) August 2, 2019
Well look at that! Disbelievers in the Just World Hypothesis outnumber believers by over 2:1. Only 3% of respondents think the world is “Very just.”
Are my respondents atypical? Indubitably. Nevertheless, I have much more confidence that my results will replicate on a national representative sample than the published academic work on this topic. If anyone wants to try, feel free to use my questions!
READER COMMENTS
Todd
Sep 30 2019 at 9:33am
I would be curious to see if those numbers change if the questions were more detailed about the type of crime committed. Or if there were a specific scenario laid out. I would intuit that most people think crime is unjust in the abstract, but would engage in more victim-blaming when given details.
KevinDC
Sep 30 2019 at 10:25am
Good point. I’ve noticed a similar phenomenon about which I’ve long been skeptical – any time someone uses the phrase “society teaches people to believe [fill in the blank].” I hear people make claims about this a lot, but without fail, whatever fills in those brackets seems to be a societal lesson I’ve completely missed. To be slightly more specific, whenever I hear someone say “Society teaches men to think…”, there is a 100% chance that whatever comes next will be something I have literally never once been told or encouraged to think, and a 99.8% chance that it will actually be the exact opposite of what I’ve been told to believe all through my life. From what I can tell, there are at least two possible reasons for this. Either I’ve somehow been absent for every single lesson of “society” ever, or people who use this phrase are just trying to invoke a cheap straw man. Could go either way, I guess.
Jeremy H
Sep 30 2019 at 2:47pm
Alternatively, I think it’s mainly that one set of societal messages can be explicit, while the opposite can be implicit. For example, during my childhood I was practically bombarded constantly with explicit (but vague and unprincipled) messages of gender equality, from parents, teachers, and media. But when people give me examples of anti-gender-equality sentiments (babies being defined by their gender, bullying for non-conforming, jokes about sex differences being generally acceptable, etc.) they are all things I’ve seen in my life that were just less noticeable to me than all the feminist rhetoric.
Plus there’s the fact that social bubbles can be really strong and what messages you get depends a lot on your upbringing, location, and media you choose to consume. See slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/02/different-worlds/
(Of course, the people complaining about lessons of “society” are only talking about a certain slice of society… but you should consider that it may be a very large slice of society. I’ve been surprised before by how many people I know and media I watch have seemingly unpopular or politically-incorrect opinions.)
Dylan
Sep 30 2019 at 3:46pm
When people say these things, I don’t think they are trying to suggest that “society” is literally teaching these things in school or anything, and in fact we might be explicitly “teaching” the opposite in school, but culturally a different lesson is being transmitted. Take for instance the messages you would have heard about smoking through all the official channels 30 years ago vs. what was communicated through pop culture. One said it was bad, would kill you, yellow your teeth, bad breath, and all that…the other one showed that all the cool kids, the rebels, the bad boys, etc… all smoked. I think we can internalize both lessons, but one tends to be more powerful.
I think it is a similar story with your example of “society teaches men to think x” where again that’s not likely the official message, but the one that can get communicated through various other channels. There’s the old standby that if men behaved the way they do in most romantic comedies they would be somewhere between creeps and arrested.
We’re all constantly getting tons of conflicting signals about how we should act, behave, be a good person, a successful person, etc…I think the intention of a lot of the “society teaches X” people is to point out that a lot of the most powerful signals we receive are actually pushing people in undesirable directions from a societal point of view. Which is probably correct, although I also think there is a chicken/egg problem in that a lot of what gets delivered to us culturally is demand driven, with Hollywood just supplying what we want to see, which then influences behavior in certain ways, creating more demand, etc…
KevinDC
Sep 30 2019 at 5:27pm
Hello Dylan,
Thanks for the response. I’ve heard versions of this line of thought before, and I freely admit that’s a coherent explanation for how things could be working in principle. However, I’m not sure I see a whole lot of evidence for it in practice. Now, I’m aware that might just be due to me being exceptionally thick when it comes to social signals, because the phrase “Exceptionally thick about social signals” will probably be engraved on my tombstone. But still, here’s a couple quick reasons why I’m skeptical of that explanation.
You suggest that while men are not explicitly being taught to believe X, and that X may in fact be contrary to what they are explicitly encouraged to believe, nonetheless X “can get communicated through various other channels.” Yes, that could be. But if that was the case, you should still expect to find people who will in fact say they believe X, even if they can’t fully account for where exactly they learned X or why they came to believe it was true. But in approximately 100% of cases when the phrase “society teaches men to think X” is used, X is also something that is just self evidently absurd and I’ve never heard a single person even claim to believe. If I was to be talking with my friends and suggest “Hey, you know what I think? X!”, the invariable response would be for people to stare at me like I was wearing pants on my head.
The usual response I get to this goes one of two ways. One is to suggest that many people do in fact believe X, but they’re lying about it. The other is more subtle, and says they just don’t realize they really do believe X, because they’ve absorbed these lessons on a subconscious level so when they say they don’t think X they’re actually somehow misinterpreting their own opinion. Both of those are technically possible, I guess. But what’s really more likely to be going on? That all these people believe these absurd things despite nobody ever actually advocating these idea for and nobody has ever claiming to believe them? Or that people are using a straw man to project absurd beliefs onto people they disagree with?
Postscript –
Didn’t at least a few people in Bryan’s poll claim to believe the absurd moral propositions Bryan suggested? Doesn’t this mean these ideas are in fact held by at least a few people? My initial response – probably not, for reasons Scott Alexander lays out in this post: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and-reptilian-muslim-climatologists-from-mars/
KevinDC
Sep 30 2019 at 5:30pm
Second postscript – please excuse the mangled grammar! I got a bit distracted midway through typing this and failed to proofread.
Dylan
Sep 30 2019 at 6:57pm
Kevin, appreciate the well thought out response. For the record, I think things are a lot more complicated than what is implied by the “society teaches x.”. There’s just a lot going on in terms of conflicting desires, incentives, human nature, social and cultural inputs, and more. Trying to point to one single factor as explanatory about a behavior ignores this complexity.
That being said, I do think there’s some validity to the social/cultural explanation, just not sure what weight to give to it. My guess is that there’s a small bit of lying, and a large dose of subconscious learning. Kind of a subset of that is learning the right lesson, but not the right way to apply it.
Since we’re on the subject of men, one example is that society teaches me to objectify women. I don’t know any guys that would say, sure it’s totally alright to objectify women. Yeah, if you listen to them talk in an unguarded moment, they are doing it all the time. I doubt they even realize what they’re doing, and it seems plausible that they’ve learned the idea that objectifying is bad, but also that their behavior that they’re doing is also totally acceptable, so it must not be objectifying.
Another example, I once worked with a guy who didn’t have a lot of confidence around women, but he had obviously learned that women liked confident men, so he overcompensated and tried to act confident. This didn’t work, and instead his behavior came off as creepy. Objectively he was doing almost exactly what he observed other guys doing, but was pretty oblivious of context and subtle social cues that would have told him that his behavior was unwelcome.
Dylan
Oct 1 2019 at 9:23am
Thanks Kevin for the reply, I wrote a long response last night that seems to have gotten caught in comment purgatory, so let’s see if I can try a shorter version this morning. I think you’re right that you wouldn’t see much direct evidence that people believe X, for any value of X that is socially undesirable, and I think that can fall into either of your two buckets. Let’s say that the official message communicated to a person is that being racist is bad, but at the same time he notices that his friends as school don’t want to play with the Indian kid, his mom locks the car doors when a black man walks by, his dad complains about “ghetto welfare queens,” etc… It seems fair to think that some of those behaviors get internalized and, when asked about it, he’ll either lie, because being a racist is bad and he doesn’t want to admit it, or he truly doesn’t think that he is racist, but nevertheless has some racist behaviors.
There’s another mechanism I think that’s related to the subconscious one, which is that the person has absorbed the right lessons, but fails at the application. Take the idea that women like confident men, which may on average be true. But the way that a lot of men interpret what it means to be confident, partially because of what they see in movies, encourages them to be obnoxious in the guise of being confident.
I should be clear that I think there’s a lot of conflicting things going on that dictate people’s behavior, and while this “society teaches X” thing is probably true to some extent, it’s likely a minority factor for most.
Jacob Egner
Sep 30 2019 at 11:33am
Bryan, I think you are aware of other survey results where people will answer one way in the general/abstract and a different way in the concrete/specific. The first example to come to mind is that people sound very libertarian when you ask whether they love freedom, and sound authoritarian when you ask about specific policies.
If you read discussions where someone had their car broken into, often there will be more than one person saying something along the lines “it takes some nerve to complain after you did all the things that lead to your car being broken into” or “wow, of course your car got broken into, dummy”.
If you ask specific scenario questions, you might get very different answers. Or, to put this in Hansonian terms: you asked a far-thought question and you shouldn’t extrapolate to near-thought so quickly.
Also in your surveys, I was very confused as to what “the typical US crime” is supposed to be. Car broken into? A drug deal gone bad and someone gets hurt? Respondents could have wildly different idea than you on what “typical US crime” is.
gwern
Sep 30 2019 at 1:38pm
You know, you could’ve run a nationally representative sample in Google Surveys in about as much time as it took you to run those Twitter polls.
Dylan
Sep 30 2019 at 4:00pm
My suspicion is that your questions are as much, if not more of a problem as your sample. I think most of us know the answer to these kinds of questions in the abstract, but we don’t think that way when presented with specific cases. I recall seeing somewhere how people weight the riskiness of a mother leaving a child alone in a car for a short amount of time based on her reason for doing so, where the exact same circumstances were deemed much riskier for the child when the mom was doing something “blameworthy” with the time (i.e. cheating on a spouse) vs. something completely out of her control (an accident took her to the hospital).
I’d think if you wanted to really investigate this, you would need your questions to be more specific and tell a story, where our intuitive judgemental side is free to come out.
Ian Fellows
Sep 30 2019 at 4:32pm
I tried posting something to this effect earlier, but the comment doesn’t seem to have gone through. Here it is. Hopefully it will post:
———————
You’ve created the worst possible design for a survey. Leaving aside the convenience sample, your questions are labeled in such a way as to lead the respondent. By assigning the words “victim” and “perpetrator” to the object, you’ve already answered the question of who is to blame. Further, the questions are so abstract that the respondent can’t make an informed answer. What is the typical U.S. crime? Maybe speeding on the highway?
I’d suggest being more specific. Something like:
Sam is a regular injection drug user who was just infected with HIV from needle sharing. How blameworthy is Sam in being infection?
Elizabeth is a 68 year old retiree who put her money in an investment promising 10% annual returns. It was a Ponzy scheme. She lost all her money and is destitute. How blameworthy is Elizabeth?
Alan choose to live in a neighborhood with high crime and accidentally left his door unlocked one day? He was burgled. How blameworthy is he?
I think you may find that blameworthiness is very contextual around how the question is framed and what additional information is provided.
Here is an example on the perpetrator side:
Sam breaks into an apartment, shooting and killing the innocent resident. How blameworthy is Sam?
Then try adding in additional (possibly true) context:
Sam is a female police officer. The resident was a black male.
Sam thought the apartment was hers. It was identical and one story up.
Sam had no motive to kill.
Sam identified herself and he rushed toward her.
Sam feared for her life and shot out of a desire for self preservation.
I know it is just a blog post, but I would expect more thoughtfulness from an academic.
Ghatanathoah
Sep 30 2019 at 4:43pm
I believe the cause of the “victim-blaming” phenomena is caused by people misunderstanding the concept of blame. In particular, it is caused by people with a simplistic understanding of the concept interacting with people with a more nuanced understanding.
“Blame” is actually a somewhat complex idea with a few components. If you are fully to blame for something, you generally have the following properties: You had a choice you could have made that could have stopped it from happening, it is just that it happened to you, you should feel ashamed that it happened, and other people have no obligation to sympathize with you or help you.
These concepts are bundled together a lot, but it is possible to separate them. There are lots of times where you could have made a choice that would have prevented something bad from happening, but you don’t deserve the other aspects of blame like shame and lack of sympathy/help. If you commit a crime you deserve blame, but if you are a victim of a crime you still deserve sympathy, even if you could have avoided being victimized if you’d made different choices.
Some people don’t get this. They don’t understand how to separate the different ideas in the concept of “blame.” To them those concepts always go together. So if someone suggests choices that a person could have made in order to avoid being victimized, it sounds to them like they are blaming that person. It sounds like they are saying that person deserves no sympathy and should feel ashamed.
Everyone I’ve talked who has been accused of victim-blaming has responded with confusion. They do not understand how anyone could think they are blaming the victim. That’s because they have a sensible, sophisticated conception of blame. They understand that you can tell someone “if you act differently you can avoid being victimized” without also saying that they are to blame for it. Blameworthiness =/= causal connectedness.
At this point I’m not sure victim blaming even exists, or that it ever existed. It seems like it’s all people who don’t understand how blame works misunderstanding people who do and then yelling at them.
Zubon
Sep 30 2019 at 6:43pm
This feels a lot like trying to disprove the efficient market hypothesis by taking a poll that shows most people think prices are too high and they are not paid enough.
You have actively solicited social desirability bias in the survey responses while making no attempt to learn their revealed preferences.
Mark Z
Oct 1 2019 at 2:30am
This hypothesis though seems to be pretty much unfalsifiable. It – – in most forms – attributes a type of behavior that has regularly occurred throughout human history and across cultures (more commonly than today almost invariably) to a cultural cause that, defined loosely enough, everyone has, in some form, been exposed to, not necessarily because it is uniquely pervasive, but because we are all exposed to countless forms of different and often contradictory sources of ‘cultural programming.’
So I think Bryan may have gone awry the moment he took ‘our culture teaches X-group to do Y’ as a meaningful hypothesis. The claim that Spike TV causes men to commit sexual assault would be a testable hypothesis, and thus probably easily disprovable, which I suspect is why cultural commentators tend to avoid making such specific and testable hypotheses.
Dylan
Oct 1 2019 at 8:20am
Mark Z, are you referring to Kevin’s comment instead of Brian’s survey? The Just World hypothesis doesn’t necessarily rely on “our culture teaches X” as a means of transmission, we could be taught this in other ways, or it could be we’re born with an innate sense of justice, etc.
I think Zubon is right though, if Brian’s survey is meant to test the Just World hypothesis, he’s doing a pretty poor job of it.
Phil H
Oct 1 2019 at 5:35am
One possible exception to what Caplan sees: sex crimes. There is a long and well-attested history of women being blamed for sex crimes of which they are the victim (increasingly recognised and corrected-for today). But I agree that this is an exception.
Ghatanathoah
Oct 1 2019 at 11:06am
Phil H, as I said in my own comment, I am not sure if that is a correct description of what happens to women who are victims of sex crimes. It is definitely true that a common reaction to hearing someone has been a victim of a sex crime is to talk about ways they could have avoided being a victim. This is a pretty stupid and insensitive thing to do after someone has had such a terrible experience. But is it the same as blaming them?
Saying that there is something you could have done to avoid being victimized is not the same as saying that you are to blame. Blame is a moral judgement, not merely a judgement of causality. A rapist who makes a decision to rape, and a victim who went on a midnight walk in a bad neighborhood have both made decisions that the crime could not have occurred without. But only the rapist is to blame, because causal responsibility is not the same as moral responsibility. The idea that victims are “blamed” originates from people who do not understand this, and can’t tell the difference between assigning causal and moral responsibility.
Telling someone that they would not have been victimized if they had not engaged in some kind of risky behavior is not the same as blaming them. Of course, that does not change the fact that it’s a pretty stupid and insensitive thing to say to them.
Thaomas
Oct 1 2019 at 10:40am
Whether people “blame the victim” seem like an extremely odd instantiation, if it is on at all, of whether people believe in the “Just World” hypothesis. [Frankly, I’d never heard of the hypothesis; it is not the same as the “best of all possible worlds” hypothesis.] I’d have asked something more explicitly economic, like “Jane’s income rose when her favorite political party reduced marginal tax rates on the corporation she owned.” How much did they [gender neutral pronoun] deserve this increase in income?” [Also ask a version in which the party Jane opposed reduced the rates. Maybe also a version in which the increase in federal deficit resulting from the rate reduction is made explicit.]
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