Victims prefer self-blame over acknowledging that the world is unfair.

Evidence

Another body of evidence suggesting that people will form negative ideas about themselves in order to make sense of social reality comes from Lerner’s (1980) work on the just-world theory. Lerner argues that people are motivated to subscribe to a “belief in a just world” in which people “get what they deserve,” since it is only in such a world that people can have control over outcomes (e.g., Lerner, 1980; Lerner & Miller, 1978). The theory accounts for the phenomenon of self-blame among victims of violence (e.g., Janoff-Bulman, 1992; Miller & Porter, 1983; Wortman, 1976), which we take to be analogous to the problem of negative self-stereotyping among the disadvantaged, by postulating that victims would rather blame themselves for their plight than admit that the world in which they live is “capricious and unfair” (Miller & Porter, 1983, p. 140; but see Crocker & Major, 1989). — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 2927

Categorization

• XREF: Ties self-blame to system justification; the author’s reading list on sacrifice and victims’ love is a natural connecting thread — the need for a ‘just’ account of one’s suffering.