We know from experience that people often blame the victims of various kinds of misfortune, e.g., assault or accident. They for instance state that the victim somehow “had it coming”, to use a common phrase, because they were reckless, did not take sufficient precautions, provoked someone to attack them, etc.

Over several decades, experimental studies also revealed the counter-intuitive phenomenon, that people often seem motivated to devalue or derogate individual victims of misfortune. In the first studies that documented this striking reaction, participants observed a confederate of the experimenters being shocked with electrodes, ostensibly as a negative reward for their wrong test answers (Lerner, 1965a; Lerner & Matthews, 1967; Lerner & Simmons, 1966). In these and many subsequent studies, participants tended to devalue the victims, e.g., finding them undesirable as a potential friend (Godfrey & Lowe, 1975), all the more so if the participants themselves were unable to help (Lerner & Simmons, 1966). Devaluation seems to be a fast, automatic response to information about misfortune (Harvey, Callan, & Matthews, 2014).

Although the phenomenon is commonly called “victim-derogation” in the early literature on the topic, we describe it as “victim-devaluation”, to mark a clear distinction between a question of character-evaluation (Does being a victim results in being devalued in the eyes of others?) on the one hand, and the question of communication (Are people motivated to tell others that you are of low value, if you are a victim?) on the other. Our studies only concerned the first question. We measured participants' evaluation of a victim's character, not their willingness to convey that evaluation to others.

Note that victim-devaluation is independent from assessments of responsibility. True, the two are often associated when experimental protocols leave open the possibility that victims could have avoided misfortune (Harvey et al., 2014; Strömwall, Alfredsson, & Landström, 2013), see survey in (Hafer & Bègue, 2005). However, in many studies, participants who could not see the victims as responsible still devalued them (Correia et al., 2012; Lerner, 1965a).

Lerner originally proposed that people generally hold a “belief in a just world” (BJW) whereby bad things mostly happen to bad people. As cases of misfortune in many cases seem to clash with that assumption, people might want to preserve their belief by assuming that the victim was not a good person after all (Lerner, 1965b, Lerner, 1980). After these initial studies, a large experimental literature confirmed the correlation between individual levels of belief in a just world, measured through normed instruments on the one hand and victim derogation or blame on the other (Furnham, 2003; Rubin & Peplau, 1975). However, the vast literature on BJW also produced mixed or confusing results, see (Hafer & Bègue, 2005; van der Bruggen & Grubb, 2014) for reviews.1 There were also methodological issues since the Just World Belief questionnaires (Lipkus, 1991; Rubin & Peplau, 1975) included items that were very close to the statement that accident victims are bad people. Therefore, participants in a typical design were asked to a) to express their agreement with the idea that victims are generally bad people, and b) provide their estimate of how “bad” a particular victim was. In essence, one was probing the same question twice.

Another interpretation posits a mechanism of “defensive attribution”, whereby people faced with evidence of misfortune would try to maintain a belief that they have control over their lives so that such events could not possibly happen to them (Shaver, 1970; Walster, 1966). Here, too, empirical studies gave mixed and often confusing results (Burger, 1981; Dalbert, 2009; Furnham, 2003).2

What are the motivations that could explain a propensity to derogate victims? Previous studies in the victim-blame and victim-derogation literature did not ask participants whether one should help the victims. But potential help certainly is a relevant dimension of people's attitudes in such situations. People who experience illness, accidents, economic downturn or familial problems generally need, request and often receive help from relatives, friends and acquaintances. In collective terms, communities offer support to those afflicted by misfortune, from informal support to institutional social welfare. So the possibility and the desirability of help are certainly relevant when people learn of some individual's misfortune.

Human fitness crucially depends on cooperation with genetically unrelated individuals. Two crucial features of human cooperation are relevant here. The first one is partner-choice, that is, when an agent intends to engage in some cooperative action, they can select among potential partners who may differ in capacities or dispositions (André & Baumard, 2011; Noe & Hammerstein, 1995). All else being equal, agents will select partners that promise optimal returns from collaboration. There is ample evidence that people choose partners in terms of both competence and cooperative dispositions (André, 2010; Delton & Robertson, 2012; Smith & Apicella, 2020; van Leeuwen, Park, & Penton-Voak, 2012). The second crucial feature of human cooperation is reputation, the fact that each agent chooses partners on the basis of information about their past behavior (Krasnow, Cosmides, Pedersen, & Tooby, 2012). Here, human communication is crucial, as it provides agents with vastly superior information about potential partners, compared to other animals who must evaluate partners of the basis of directly witnessed interactions (Bshary & Grutter, 2005). In the small-scale societies of human evolutionary environments and also (in a different way) in modern mass-communication societies, people can easily access information about potential partners that help evaluate the potential benefits but also the costs of cooperating with them (Barclay, 2015; Delton & Robertson, 2012).

Given these features of cooperation, it is relevant to consider in what way the fact that someone is the victim of misfortune would affect these appraisals of potential costs and benefits. Three considerations are relevant here:

Victims create costs for others. When people are victims of misfortune, they generally require social support, with direct and opportunity costs for people beyond the victim. Archeological and anthropological evidence strongly suggests that a) accidents and illness were and are a common occurrence for foragers, causing severe effects on people's productive capacities (Sugiyama & Sugiyama, 2003); b) victims of misfortune received considerable help in the form of social support, food, protection, etc. (Hill, Hurtado, & Walker, 2007). For archeological evidence that people received social support and survived bone injuries or congenital illnesses, see (Grauer, 2011; Weston, 2011). This would imply that cooperating with victims constitutes an investment whose long-term return is uncertain (as it always is), but that additionally involves an up-front, unavoidable cost.

The victims' fate may suggest poor cooperation potential. Victims may be seen as poor cooperation partners. To the extent that people's past performance cues provide cues to future behavior, this would trigger a motivation to avoid cooperation with them. The victims' misfortune may indicate incompetence, which would decrease their value as potential partners. It might also indicate negligence, as well as callousness in engaging in behaviors that may create costs for others, to the extent that others are required to help victims. These two factors, specific manifestations of a more general “warmth-competence” distinction (Eisenbruch & Krasnow, 2022; Wojciszke, 2005), would probably have a different impact on help to victims, as incompetence may be domain-specific (so that there could still remain some cooperation potential in that person), whereas low concern for others would be seen as relevant to cooperation in many different domains.

Helping victims contributes to one's own cooperation reputation. Despite the previously mentioned reasons to avoid cooperation with victims, the fact that social support for victims is widespread in human societies would suggest that, under specific circumstances, some fitness benefits offset the various costs of social support. Individuals may help, not in the expectation of reciprocation, but as a way of communicating to third parties their willingness to be generally generous cooperators. A motivation to help those in need makes sense in a species where cooperation is based on reputation with a long horizon for future cooperation, and could also signal that the helper has abundant enough resources to be a desirable partner (Sugiyama & Sugiyama, 2003; Tooby & Cosmides, 1996).

In the present studies, we tested some implication of the cooperation perspective. If devaluation is motivated by a desire to distance oneself from possible cooperation with a victim, then we should expect a direct correlation between a) people's reluctance to provide help for victims and b) their tendency to derogate the victim. We considered the voluntary donation a fairly clear indication of the participants' view of the victim as a cooperation partner, in the sense that, all else being equal, people would not want to help those who are unlikely to reciprocate. The second measure, about the victim's character, is a standard measure of what is called victim devaluation in the literature, see for instance (Lerner, 1965a). To the extent that victims as seen as poor cooperation prospects, participants would be reluctant to offer help to the victims, since such offers (in general) suggest that the recipient of help is “deserving” (Petersen, Sznycer, Cosmides, & Tooby, 2012), i.e. is a potential cooperator (Delton & Robertson, 2012).

In these studies, we asked participants to contribute some of their own money to helping people like the victim of this accident (studies 1–4) or to provide direct help to that victim (study 5). In studies 1–2, these were presented as real, not hypothetical donations from our participants, and in study 3 the donation was actually taken from the participants' bonus. So, the protocol in effect asked the participants whether people like the victims described were worth helping, which should be directly affected by the participants' estimate of that person's potential as a cooperator. Second, we asked participants to evaluate the victim's character, as well as other features of the situation. Derogating victims, in such a context, might indicate either simple self-interest, or a combination of self-interest with the representation of the victim as not “deserving” of help. In addition, study 4 measured the effect of donations given from our lab rather than the individual's own funds. So we checked whether the correlation of devaluation and help to victims would persist, when the participants are not asked to bear the costs of such help.

In these first four studies, we used vignettes that presented victims in a way that was ambiguous, so that the participants' reactions could vary as regards the character of the victim. For instance, we presented individuals whose possible negligence caused some disaster – e.g., not monitoring a frying pan leads to a kitchen fire, but negligence might be a rare occurrence in that persons' behavior, or it may stem from habitual carelessness. Also, these individuals' misfortune resulted in serious hardship for other people – e.g., the kitchen fire left them with such injuries, and, therefore, their parents will have to work extra jobs to help them with medical bills. But, again, this is ambiguous as the victim might genuinely need that help, or they may just have exploited their family's generous dispositions. By contrast, in study 5, we systematically manipulated two factors that would be crucial to cooperation motivations, namely, whether the victim was competent or not, and whether they show concern for other people's interests.

As mentioned above, people's evaluations of a victim of misfortune in terms of future cooperation could be affected both by perceived competence (the person was not capable of carrying out the task) and by cooperative dispositions (did the victims consider that their own costs could create costs for others?). In study 5, we explored the effects of these two factors on our participants' judgments about the victims' character and potential for future cooperation.

Although we also asked participants to attribute possible “blame” to the victim, our predictions focused on the question of character, which was at the origin of this literature, and is conceptually clearer than that of blame (see comments in General Discussion below). The inclusion of a blame question in our studies also helped clarify the process involved in motivating devaluation. If participants find victims undesirable cooperation partners, they would be motivated to derogate them and deny them their help. But that would not predict a specific effect on blame. If on the other hand victim-devaluation is part of a general negative “halo effect” on the victim, then blame and devaluation should be systematically correlated.