Victims are perceived as more morally virtuous than non-victims

> "Another open question is whether the Virtuous Victim effect occurs across cultures, including in populations that are not “WEIRD” (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic). As just articulated, our theorizing predicts that the generalizability of the Virtuous Victim effect across cultures is likely to depend on the universality of incentives for punishing perpetrators and helping victims. For example, in cultures and contexts where victims are seen as contaminated and helping them is not socially rewarded, we predict that the Virtuous Victim effect may disappear (or even reverse)."

This would be the more interesting question to study as I frequently find that social justice (as projected in the popular culture) is perceived somewhat differently, especially around situations where a victim acted in a manner that was more likely to lead to the bad outcome i.e. "victim-blaming"

That's the influence of Christianity.

In paganism, victims were perceived as losers, who, if not deserved what they got, at least where weak and couldn't prevent it, so not as good as a strong person.

The change in perception, is, in many aspects an improvement.

(And yes, it didn't always hold under Christianity either, for reasons of rationalization -those aren't victims, they're offenders we must punish-, hypocrisy, etc - and basically because no doctrine applied by humans is applied perfectly. But ideologically, it was the Christian mindset in favor of the victim that eventually caught on. That's also where people from Nietctze to Marx ascribed contemporary concerns for "human rights" and so on).

This article reminded me of the Malcolm X quote on corporate media

“If you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”

The original study, which the article nicely links: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abg5902

They had 16 different psych experiments (recruit subjects, tell them a story about a "victim", ask them about the victim's moral virtue). For 15 of the 16 experiments, the subjects were recruited online via Amazon Turk. I'd be concerned that Amazon Turk-recruited psych subjects are not even reliably representative of WEIRD populations (the point of crateless's comment), let alone non-WEIRD populations.

From their summary table, all 16 of their experiments (with various stories being told to the subjects) sound like "the victim was the chosen target of lone bad person". So - no victims of unsafe consumer products, nor of cancer, nor natural disaster, nor famine, nor systematic racism/sexism/etc., nor malicious or failed government, nor of war, etc. Extrapolating this study's results, to those types of victims, would be very difficult to justify. But (my impression) most of the current hot topics in the news, in public policy debate, and on HN involve those types of victims.

SO: The current title - "Victims are perceived as more morally virtuous than non-victims" - seems, in the general context here on HN, extremely overstated.

Yeah, this is why politicians have themselves shot and wounded. Eases reelection.

Wanting by Luke Burgis talks a lot about the change of attitude toward victims being a recent phenomenon