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  • October 15, 2021
  • Article
  • Science Advances

Virtuous Victims

By: Jillian J. Jordan and Maryam Kouchaki
  • Format:Electronic
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Abstract

How do people perceive the moral character of victims? We find, across a range of transgressions, that people frequently see victims of wrongdoing as more moral than non-victims who have behaved identically. Across 15 experiments (total n = 9,355), we document this Virtuous Victim effect and explore the mechanisms underlying it. We also find support for the Justice Restoration Hypothesis, which proposes that people see victims as moral because this perception serves to motivate punishment of perpetrators and helping of victims—and people frequently face incentives to enact or encourage these “justice-restorative” actions. Our results validate predictions of this hypothesis, and suggest that the Virtuous Victim effect does not merely reflect (i) that victims look good in contrast to perpetrators, (ii) that people are generally inclined to positively evaluate those who have suffered, or (iii) that people hold a genuine belief that victims tend to be people who behave morally.

Keywords

Moral Judgment; Restorative Justice; Punishment; Compensation; Person Perception; Moral Sensibility; Judgments; Perception

Citation

Jordan, Jillian J., and Maryam Kouchaki. "Virtuous Victims." Science Advances 7, no. 42 (October 15, 2021).
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About The Author

Jillian J. Jordan

Negotiation, Organizations & Markets
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More from the Authors
  • Punitive but Discerning: Reputation Can Fuel Ambiguously-Deserved Punishment, but Does Not Erode Sensitivity to Nuance By: Jillian J. Jordan and Nour S. Kteily
  • Negotiating a Legacy at Sustainable Harvest By: Jillian J. Jordan, Julian Zlatev and Anoushka Kiyawat
  • Negotiating with Data: Analytics FC By: Jillian Jordan, Livia Alfonsi and Anoushka Kiyawat
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