The just-world hypothesis: why we assume victims must have deserved it

Psychologist Melvin Lerner found that people have a deep need to believe the world is fair, where good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad ones. Rather than accept that misfortune can strike at random, observers often decide a suffering victim must have done something to deserve it. In Lerner's 1960s experiments, watching an innocent person receive electric shocks made onlookers rate her more harshly, not more sympathetically.

— Melvin J. Lerner, The Belief in a Just World: A Fundamental Delusion — Plenum Press, 1980
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