Fairer World Research Articles

Reactions to victims under conditions of situational detachment: The effect of responsibility, severity, and expected future interaction.

The research of Learner and others suggests that people tend to derogate innocent victims. A crucial assumption underlying Lerner's approach is that observers, unable to ascribe some misdeed to a victim, will attempt to convince themselves that the victim deserved his suffering by attributing personal unworthiness to him. The analysis developed in the present study, however, suggests certain circumstances under which innocent victims would not be devalued by strangers. The experimental design holds constant the observer's situational removal from the victim's misfortune and thereby facilitates a separation and assessment of factors that have been interlocked in previous research. Subjects learn about the victim's problem through examination of a clinical data folder; they either do, or do not, expect to meet the victim at a subsequent experimental session. The victim is portrayed as either innocent or responsible for her misfortune, and her suffering is described as either severe or mild. Consistent with predictions, innocent victims were not derogated vis-a-vis responsible ones; victims of severe suffering were evaluated less favorably than those of mild misfortune; and subjects who expected to meet the victim rated her more favorably than those who did not anticipate future interaction with her. According to Lerner's just-outcome hypothesis, people need to believe that they live in an orderly, fair world where one's outcomes are determined by one's behavior and personal merit. In service of this need, people interpret the events in the lives of others so as to maintain the belief that individuals get what they

The Wisdom of Silenus in O'Neill's Iceman

o O NIETZSCHE the most profound art of tragedy was characterized L by a primal conflict between the two opposing, if not necessarily opposite, forces within the human consciousness-the Dionysiac and the Apollonian.' That tragedy became a lost art he attributed to a substitution (by Socrates and followers, who have come to include most of the philosophers, theologians and intellectuals of the Western world) of a third force for the Apollonian, namely the force of intellectual or verbal evasion which he designated Socratic.2 The Dionysiac force can be described as man's direct and intuitive awareness of own consciousness, of its essentially chaotic and infinite nature, and of the ultimately uncontrollable psychic forces there at work. This awareness leads inevitably to pessimism, despair, and death-longing. In order to withstand this appalling vision, in order to gaze at the Gorgon's head and not submit to petrifaction, it was necessary for man to create illusions and to willfully identify the life of the individual with these illusions.3 This process of resisting the despair of the Dionysiac vision through illusion describes the Apollonian force. We have here a purposeful self-deception for is ... the soothsaying god,4 and he who turned to him found life supportable albeit his Apollonian consciousness was but a thin veil hiding from him the whole Dionysiac realm.5 In tragedy we find both the fair world of Apollo and its substratum, the terrible wisdom of Silenus, and we can comprehend intuitively how they mutually require one another.6 We need not necessarily agree with Nietzsche that Euripides was too Socratic and meaningful to be truly tragic and thus signaled