Looking for source of a blaming the victim trick question

Hello, a long time ago my psych prof used a trick question to demonstrate how people have the tendency to blame the victim. I have forgotten the source and would like to find it.

The general idea of the story is that a woman sneaks out at night and goes across the river to have an affair. She misses her boat coming back and is stranded during the night. She tries to get help from many people, but they all refuse to help. Eventually some guy comes out and stabs her. The question at the end is who is to blame.

Anyone have any idea of the source? Thanks~

What’s the trick of this question?

Most people blame the woman.

Really? Because I was thinking the obvious answer is the stabber is to blame for the stabbing so I was thinking the trick answer must be that he somehow wasn’t to blame.

I wonder how well the trick of this question works in different groups of people. IMHO, blaming the victim seems to be more likely among older/right wing types.

Yes, actually I butchered the story, so this is not how it is usually presented. I, too, intuitively blamed the stabber; however, I’ve usually been in the minority. In my first year psych class a long time ago, over 70% or so blamed the woman. Here in Korea, most of the people who I try it on blame the woman. It’s not a Korean thing though as Westerners fall for it readily as well.

I’m looking for the source and the original story so that I can present it accurately.

Pullet, I would assume that; however, I do not believe that is the case. It works well among young students across the political spectrum.

It is a cognitive bias; therefore, there are other versions that could be constructed even for the most liberal or conservative.

There’s an extended version of your story on page 3 of this social psychology file (PDF). Does that help?

In the story as you tell it, I find it hard to believe that anyone would not put the main blame for the stabbing on the stabber himself. Surely no-one would suggest that the woman should be prosecuted and the stabber should get off scot free? I can see, however, why some people might feel that the woman does deserve some small degree of blame (if she had not been irresponsibly going into dangerous areas at night, alone, it would not have happened), whereas others might insist that she should not be blamed at all. The fact that she was going there to “have an affair” (does this mean to cheat on her regular partner?) might lead some people to blame her more than they would if she was out at night for some less “sinful” purpose. That may be the “trick” because her reason for being there is irrelevant to the issue of how much she is to blame for the stabbing. It really makes no difference to her responsibility (if any) for the stabbing, if she was there to commit murder (of some third party) or to distribute charity to the poor. However, even if her reason for being there is entirely praiseworthy, one could still argue that she deserves some blame for her lack of caution.

Are you sure that the story was about stabbing, and not about rape? It is usually in the case of rape that some people insist most vehemently that victims are never to blame at all, even in slightest.

Are you sure the story you heard was not just some example that the professor you heard it from made up for him/herself? Teachers do do that.

Perhaps blame and guilt are two different animals. Had she not created the situation by screwing around, the stabbing woulnd not have happened. Of course, the stabber is guilty of, well, stabbing. They’re both guilty of something and there are no “ofsetting penalties” - and infidelity is not usually a crime that’s prosecuted.

Verdict: Stabber gets 3 years.
Lady gets summarily dumped by boyfriend and labelled as promiscuous.

Njtt, read Schnitte’s PDF, my version is butchered. I was only trying to find the article.

Schnitte, you are awesome, thanks!

Surely there has to be more than what the pdf gave? People seriously rank the wife in blame over the man who stabbed her? Are you sure it’s not something to do with the #2 in blame, because I’d put the woman at #2 in line of fault among those cast of characters. Clearly the man who stabbed her has the most responsibility in her death, but she has to be #2. Are her lovers supposed to be responsible for her financial difficulties? The ferryman? Is the husband to blame for her wandering interest?

I don’t see how anyone can answer any differently. How can the woman possibly be more responsible for her death than the man who put a knife in her? Is the highwayman seen as a force of nature?

I think there’s a big difference between criminal culpability and practical fault. I believe that it is a general legal principle that a person has a general right not to be the victim of a crime, regardless of whether they have been practically negligent in terms of making themselves an attractive victim.

Now, if I get a few thousand dollars of my own cash, leave it on the back seat of my car, park my car in the “hood”, then leave it there for a few months, I probably shouldn’t be surprised if I’ve been the victim of a crime, though there may not be anything the police can pin on me, though they also may not be too willing to help since I was obviously “negligent” in a practical sense, and that I should have either not parked in the hood or should have hidden my cash.

I think a person may rank the woman most to blame along this line of thinking.

I live in Chicago, and not to far from my home is Humboldt Park. This is not a good neighborhood. Suppose I took $500.00 out of the bank and walked around the park and had my money in my hand exposed for the world to see.

And then someone comes up and hits me and takes the money. Who’s at fault? In this case many would say me. I made no attempt to conceal the money. I actively was walking around in a place that was known to me to be dangerous and a place where a mugging might occur. People would say, “You got mugged because of your own foolish behaviour, and you should’ve known better.”

In the story in the PDF, this woman acts foolishly. She does dishonest things. She is foolish as she wasn’t prepared for her round trip fare. She then begs money of Man #2 whom she had a quarrel with before, thus not learning anything from her mistake of quarrelling, as she repeats it with man #1.

She then enters an area where it’s KNOWN to be dangerous. Still she values her marriage more than the, risk to her own life.

Now you may not agree with how some people could say the woman is at fault but some will.

Let’s change this a bit.

Suppose instead of a highway man stabbing herself, the woman remembers a bridge that is old and deteriorating. This bridge is fenced off and maked “danger do not use - unsafe” And she chooses to climb over the fence and ignore the sign and use the bridge hoping she can make it across." But it breaks and she falls into the river.

Who’s to blame then?

Now those situations are similar but not analogous, because in the original example, the woman is acting passively and in my example she is acting actively. But in both cases she ignores clear and present dangers, known to her, to take a risk.

How many times do we hear of a guy who smokes like a chimney then gets lung cancer. Or someone who doesn’t use a condom and get’s pregnant or HIV?

We feel sorry for the person and backhandedly dismiss it by adding “Well he should’ve known.”

And that is the real key to this question. When a person takes a risk and that risk cost him, whether it’s your life, health or financial, people look at the RISK and the factors surround it. If the person acted without thinking or it wasn’t a well thought out plan, they blame the victim.

A quick Google brought up a thread on another forum where someone asked this question, and indeed it seems that a majority of the respondents name the woman as being the most responsible, with some people saying that the husband is at fault for her being so lonely that she goes looking for love in dangerous places:
http://www.basilmarket.com/forum/1252176/1

It would have been interesting to see Doper’s answers to the story in its original form, without being warned in advance that it was going to be a “blaming the victim trick question”. Too late now…

The highwayman in the story, the rapist in many a similar question, and the robber in Marxxx’s hypothetical are all easy to depersonalize – they’re more forces of nature than they are actors. They’re inserted into the story to create risk, and can’t be blamed for anything. It seems, to me at least, that this presumption lies behind the “blame the victim” phenomenon for a good many people.

In real life, some victims get blamed, but no one actually advocates for letting a killer, rapist, or robber go free because “she was asking for it.” (Well, the defense attorney and the criminal’s friends, family, etc., but I’m not talking about them)

True – people don’t spend much time considering the moral culpability of the highwayman, because he is just a faceless random character in the story, like the interchangeable orcs in the LOTR movies.

Still, you would expect that when people are specifically asked to rank the story’s characters in order of culpability, so that they have to place the highwayman somewhere relative to the woman, they ought to assign him the highest culpability, even if the rest of the discussion then focuses on what the woman should have done differently and to what extent her two lovers and the ferryman deserve any blame…

Since it is inevitable that this thread will turn from a GQ to a GD in the long run, I might just as well chip in my personal assessment of the relative attribution of responsibilty. The order is in descending degrees of responsibility.

  1. The highwayman, for reasons obvious now - after all, it was him who committed the murder.
  2. The ferryman. He did not really have sufficient reason not to help the woman, given that he knew the risks. He did not have a personal vendetta with the woman about anything, and since he knew her as a regular customer he could have been reasonably sure to get his fare the next day. His insistence on anonymous rules under these circumstances is what makes me rank him second.
  3. The woman. She acted foolishly, exposing herself to the dangerous situation. By that I don’t mean having the love affair in the first place, but I mean that she was willling to take disporportionate risks to be home in time.
  4. Lover 2. He could have helped her despite being personally at odds with the woman.
  5. Lover 1, for the same reason. I rank lover 2 above lover 1 because in the latter case, the quarrel with the woman was still fresh and so lover 1 had a more justifiable reason for not helping her than lover 2, whose quarrel with the woman dates some time back. The difference might be slight though.
  6. The husband. I don’t really see any sort of responsibility on his part, but the question asks to rank all six characters of the story, so here he is.

I would rank Lover 1 higher than Lover 2. The latter doesn’t have any kind of relationship with the woman anymore; he has no more ethical duty towards her than a random passer-by. But when you receive a guest in your house, I’d say you have some duty to help them get home safely afterwards, even if they don’t leave you on good terms. The fact that they just had a quarrel makes Lover 1’s refusal more understandable, but it doesn’t really change his moral responsibility.

I wouldn’t put a lot of blame on the ferryman, and I certainly wouldn’t rank him more culpable than the woman herself. He has a business to run, and it’s his decision whether or not to extend credit to customers. Presumably, he knows the husband as a regular customer as well; perhaps he doesn’t want to get actively involved in her deceiving him.

Keep in mind that, even after the two lovers and the ferryman all refused to help her, she still didn’t have to go down the dangerous road; she could have just sat down at the ferry terminal to wait for her husband, and then either admit her adultery to him or try to make up some story. So by loaning her money, the three men would not have been saving her life; they would simply have assisted her in hiding her adultery from her husband. Courting danger in order to try and get home before him, was the woman’s own decision.

So my order would be: highwayman, woman, Lover #1, ferryman, Lover #2, husband, with the relative ranking of the ferryman being the most debatable one.

Note that we’re really talking about different kinds of ‘blame’ here: the highwayman deliberately committed a horrible crime, the woman made a string of poor decisions which ended her in a bad situation but she did not do anything for which she deserved death, while the worst that can be said of any of the others is that they were in a position where they easily could have helped somebody, but chose not to.