Moral Foundations’ Influence On Blame Attribution of Male Sexual Assault Victims

Abstract

Graham and his colleagues (2009) found that conservatives and liberals use different sets of moral foundations when assessing everyday situations. Blame attribution has been linked to participant’s beliefs in rape myths which are usually based on stereotypical gender roles, such as a male should be able to fight off an attacker (Davies, Gilston, & Rogers, 2012). Conservatives tend to hold more traditional values; thus, they may be more likely to blame sexual assault victims when the circumstances threaten those traditional gender roles. Participants answered a moral foundations questionnaire, read a vignette of a sexual assault in which the victim was male and varied in victim sexual orientation and perpetrator sex. Participants then answered questions that assessed the amount of blame they attributed to the victim. We found that when participants held high ingroup/loyalty foundations, they attributed more blame when the victim assaulted by a male perpetrator.