Blaming the Victim: The Psychology of Innocence and Guilt

Matthew Sharps

Criminal justice, at least in theory, is required in most of the modern world to be impartial. Admissible factors within the systems are supposed to derive from the dispassionate consideration of law, logical arguments, and evidence.

Yet this is not always the case; suspects in particularly heinous crimes have sometimes been convicted without direct evidentiary connections, and it’s an odd fact that victims are often blamed, at least in part, for crimes committed against them (e.g., Karmen, 2004). Such blame is often based, infamously, on concepts such as “she led him on”; and since in such cases the victim broke no laws and the perpetrator did, these concepts are not based on law or defensible logic. So, what psychological factors may lead to these frequently egregious assertions?

Research has shown that respondents are more likely to return a guilty verdict for a given suspect based on the violence of the given crime, even without additional evidence. Violence in crimes can also cause respondents to overlook flaws in logic and evidence (Sharps et al., 2013).

Violence may interact with individual psychological differences to influence the judgment of crimes. An important individual difference lies in dissociation (e.g., DePrince and Freyd, 1999). Dissociation, essentially, is a partial psychological removal from concrete reality. In perfectly normal people, dissociation may make it possible to entertain ideas not based in logic or evidence, and to ignore the concrete and logical in favor of the abstract and vague. Dissociation may allow us to see the world as more ethereal and unreal than it actually is; and frequently, perhaps especially in the forensic realm, this can have negative consequences for cognitive outcomes (Sharps, 2022).

In view of these considerations, a new experiment was conducted to address the potential interactive influence of violence and dissociation on judgments of the relative guilt and innocence of perpetrators and victims (Sharps et al., 2024). In this study, adult respondents read one of three realistic, field-valid crime scenarios. The scenarios all involved the theft of a wallet, but respondents read about this theft in the presence of only one of three levels of violence: no violence, physical assault, or murder.

Dissociative tendencies were measured by means of the Dissociative Experiences Scale (DES)-II. Respondents rated the level of responsibility for the given crime, on the part of both the perpetrator and victim, on a one-to-seven rating scale.

Interestingly, scenario violence had no discernible effect on the perception of perpetrator guilt or innocence. However, violence had a significant effect on the attribution of guilt to the victim; if the victim was assaulted or murdered during the theft, victim responsibility, guilt, was rated as lower than if the victim had merely suffered a theft. Amazingly, no difference was seen with reference to those victims either assaulted or murdered; it was the mere presence of violence, rather than the level of violence, that produced this effect.

What about dissociation, with its tendency to obscure concrete physical reality in favor of more ethereal concepts? Dissociative tendencies, as measured by the DES-II, did not predict greater levels of guilt attribution to the victim if simply robbed or even assaulted. However, dissociation was significantly associated with greater attribution of victim responsibility if the victim was murdered.

In other words, only persons exhibiting relatively high levels of dissociation saw the victim as relatively responsible, as blamable, if that victim was actually killed in the course of the crime. In the presence of theft or even physical assault, dissociation did not play a role in assigning blame to the victim; a respondent had to be relatively dissociated to decide that the victim, essentially, was somehow guilty of being murdered.

Respondents who were more dissociated also tended to see the perpetrator as less guilty of the crime, but without regard to violence at all. This may help to explain cases in which guilty parties have been exonerated in direct opposition to facts in evidence.

These findings may also help to clarify the psychological dynamics of such fundamental judicial considerations as guilt or innocence, including the perennially pernicious "blame the victim" effect. It is hoped that future research will clarify other psychological dynamics in the contextual realm (e.g., crime violence) and the realm of individual differences (e.g. dissociation), as well as the critical interactions between these types of factors.

Most of us assume that judicial proceedings are based only on logic and evidence; but the research reviewed here indicates that this is far from the case. The context of a given crime, including the violence of that crime, causes our affective and emotional characteristics to influence our cognitive processes; and the individual psychological differences with which we confront the world, such as our dissociative tendencies, may also color our judgments. This is a crucial field of psychological practice and inquiry; we need to understand and introduce the verifiable concepts of modern psychology into the venerable realm of the judiciary. Legally, we are all guaranteed fair trials if accused; but we now know that human psychology is a major influence on the fairness of such trials. We need a better understanding of the factors involved, and we need to develop a greater awareness of the importance of psychological factors in the criminal justice system.

In our next post on the Forensic View, we will address these issues in a more remote but still critically relevant context: the infamous ancient Greek trial of the philosopher Socrates.