Can Blaming Victims of Rape be Logical? Attribution Theory and Discourse Analytic Perspectives
研究通过对话分析检验了强奸受害者指责是否可能源于逻辑归因过程，发现参与者并未逻辑地使用协变信息指责受害者，而是对任务隐含的推论高度敏感。
While it is frequently assumed that blaming the victims rather than the perpetrators of rape is the result of biases in causal reasoning, one rape perception study (Calhoun et al., 1976) suggests that blame attributions directed at the victim can occur as a result of logical attributional processes through the systematic and rational application of the covariational rules of inductive reasoning. The aim of the present study was to investigate this assertion. The study is unique in two ways. First, participants were asked to discuss a rape incident rather than evaluate it using questionnaire methods. Second, the study focused on the rape of males as well as the rape of females. Two analyses were performed on the conversational data - a content analysis yielding quantitative data and a qualitative discourse analysis. The main findings were that, contrary to predictions, participants did not use the covariation information to blame the victim of rape `logically'. Instead, the most frequently utilized category was `meta-commentary' which showed that the participants were extremely sensitive to the inferences implied by the covariation information and the task in general. The findings are discussed in relation to attribution theory and rape perception.