A Self-Regulation Hypothesis of Coping with an Unjust World: Ego-Depletion and Self-Affirmation as Underlying Aspects of Blaming of Innocent Victims

Abstract

People have a need to Belief in a Just World (BJW) in which people get what they deserve. When people are confronted with an event which threatens this BJW (e.g. when they witness a girl falling victim to rape), people try to maintain their existing beliefs, for example, by blaming the innocent victim for her ill fate. We argue that this defensive process of blaming innocent victims in essence stems from self-regulatory failure. In accordance with this line of reasoning, our first experiment shows that when self-regulatory resources were depleted (i.e. in the case of high ego-depletion) before BJW threatening information describing an innocent victim of a rape crime, the effect of BJW threat on victim blaming amplified. Study 2 shows that when self-regulation was facilitated by means of self-affirmation after the BJW threatening information, the effect of BJW threat on victim blaming vanished. Taken together, our findings suggest that coping with BJW threats involve self-regulatory processes leading to more or less defensive reactions (like blaming innocent victims). When people’s self-regulatory resources are depleted, they react more negatively to innocent victims when they constitute a stronger threat to the BJW. Facilitating self-regulation, by means of self-affirmation, enables people to cope with BJW threatening information, thereby inhibiting the urge to blame innocent victims.