On mimicry and the psychology of the belief in a just world: Imitating the behaviors of others reduces the blaming of innocent victims [Dataset]

DOI

Innocent victims of crime are often blamed for what happened to them. In this article, we examine the hypothesis that victim blaming can be significantly reduced when people mimic the behavior of the victim or even a person unrelated to the crime. Participants watched a person on a video after which we assessed the extent of their spontaneous mimicry reactions (Study 1) or participants were instructed to mimic or not to mimic the movements of this person (Study 2). Then, they were informed about a rape and criminal assault and judged the degree to which they thought the victims were responsible for the crime. One of the crimes happened to the same person as the person they previously did or did not mimic. The other crime happened to a person unrelated to the mimicry situation. Results of both studies revealed that previously mimicking the victim or an unrelated person reduced the degree to which victims were being blamed.

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.34894/4GPOPY
Metadata Access https://dataverse.nl/oai?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_datacite&identifier=doi:10.34894/4GPOPY
Provenance
Creator M. Stel; K. van den Bos; M. Bal
Publisher DataverseNL
Contributor M. Stel; Research Data Office; DataverseNL
Publication Year 2013
Rights CC-BY-4.0; info:eu-repo/semantics/restrictedAccess; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
OpenAccess false
Contact M. Stel; Research Data Office (Tilburg University)
Representation
Resource Type Experimental data; Dataset
Format application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document; application/zip
Size 41338; 133405919
Version 4.2
Discipline Agriculture, Forestry, Horticulture, Aquaculture; Agriculture, Forestry, Horticulture, Aquaculture and Veterinary Medicine; Life Sciences; Social Sciences; Social and Behavioural Sciences; Soil Sciences