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Paranoia is an instinct or thought process that is believed to be heavily influenced by anxiety, suspicion, or fear, often to the point of delusion and irrationality. Paranoid thinking typically includes persecutory beliefs, or beliefs of conspiracy concerning a perceived threat towards oneself. Paranoia is distinct from phobias, which also involve irrational fear, but usually no blame.
Victimology is the study of victimization, including the psychological effects on victims, the relationship between victims and offenders, the interactions between victims and the criminal justice system—that is, the police and courts, and corrections officials—and the connections between victims and other social groups and institutions, such as the media, businesses, and social movements.
In social psychology, the fundamental attribution error is a cognitive attribution bias in which observers underemphasize situational and environmental factors for the behavior of an actor while overemphasizing dispositional or personality factors. In other words, observers tend to overattribute the behaviors of others to their personality and underattribute them to the situation or context. Although personality traits and predispositions are considered to be observable facts in psychology, the fundamental attribution error is an error because it misinterprets their effects.
Victim blaming occurs when the victim of a crime or any wrongful act is held entirely or partially at fault for the harm that befell them. There is historical and current prejudice against the victims of domestic violence and sex crimes, such as the greater tendency to blame victims of rape than victims of robbery if victims and perpetrators knew each other prior to the commission of the crime. The Gay Panic Defense has also been used to justify violence against LGBT people.
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Relational aggression, alternative aggression, or relational bullying is a type of aggression in which harm is caused by damaging someone's relationships or social status.
System justification theory is a theory within social psychology that system-justifying beliefs serve a psychologically palliative function. It proposes that people have several underlying needs, which vary from individual to individual, that can be satisfied by the defense and justification of the status quo, even when the system may be disadvantageous to certain people. People have epistemic, existential, and relational needs that are met by and manifest as ideological support for the prevailing structure of social, economic, and political norms. Need for order and stability, and thus resistance to change or alternatives, for example, can be a motivator for individuals to see the status quo as good, legitimate, and even desirable.
Grandiose delusions (GDs), also known as delusions of grandeur or expansive delusions, are a subtype of delusion characterized by extraordinary belief that one is famous, omnipotent, wealthy, or otherwise very powerful. Grandiose delusions often have a religious, science fictional, or supernatural theme. Examples include the extraordinary belief that one is a deity or celebrity, or that one possesses extraordinary talents, accomplishments, or superpowers.
Victimisation is the state or process of being victimised or becoming a victim. The field that studies the process, rates, incidence, effects, and prevalence of victimisation is called victimology.
The International Society for Justice Research is an interdisciplinary scholarly scientific organization dedicated to the interdisciplinary study of justice and the related phenomena of morality and ethics. ISJR fosters international and interdisciplinary collaboration and promotes the exchange of new ideas, research, and theories related to justice and these related phenomena. ISJR facilitates such collaboration and exchange and the dissemination of knowledge through the publication of an academic journal Social Justice Research, the conduct of biennial scientific conferences, regular newsletters, and informal discussion by means of a listserv. Through these activities ISJR connects scholars in a wide variety of disciplines and geographic locations who are all focused on the study of justice. Scholars from a host of fields, including social psychology, sociology, economics, ethology and animal behavior, history, law and others are represented among the society's membership.
The just-world fallacy, or just-world hypothesis, is the cognitive bias that assumes that "people get what they deserve" – that actions will necessarily have morally fair and fitting consequences for the actor. For example, the assumptions that noble actions will eventually be rewarded and evil actions will eventually be punished fall under this fallacy. In other words, the just-world fallacy is the tendency to attribute consequences to—or expect consequences as the result of— either a universal force that restores moral balance or a universal connection between the nature of actions and their results. This belief generally implies the existence of cosmic justice, destiny, divine providence, desert, stability, order, or the anglophone colloquial use of "karma". It is often associated with a variety of fundamental fallacies, especially in regard to rationalizing suffering on the grounds that the sufferers "deserve" it. This is called victim blaming.
Jorge Vala, PhD in social psychology, University of Louvain, was a full professor at ISCTE - Lisbon University Institute, and is currently a researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences (ICS)/University of Lisbon.
Victim mentality is a psychological concept referring to a mindset in which a person, or group of people, tends to recognize or consider themselves a victim of the negative actions of others. In some cases, those with a victim mentality have in fact been the victim of wrongdoing by others or have otherwise suffered misfortune through no fault of their own. The term is also used in reference to the tendency for blaming one's misfortunes on somebody else's misdeeds, which is also referred to as victimism.
In social psychology, shattered assumptions theory proposes that experiencing traumatic events can change how victims and survivors view themselves and the world. Specifically, the theory – published by Ronnie Janoff-Bulman in 1992 – concerns the effect that negative events have on three inherent assumptions: overall benevolence of the world, meaningfulness of the world, and self worth. These fundamental beliefs are the bedrock of our conceptual system and are the assumptions we are least aware of and least likely to challenge. They constitute our "assumptive world," defined as "a strongly held set of assumptions about the world and the self which is confidently maintained and used as a means of recognizing, planning, and acting" by C. M. Parkes. According to Janoff-Bulman, traumatic life events shatter these core assumptions, and coping involves rebuilding a viable assumptive world.
Max Coltheart is an Australian cognitive scientist who specialises in cognitive neuropsychology and cognitive neuropsychiatry.
Rape myths are prejudicial, stereotyped, and false beliefs about sexual assaults, rapists, and rape victims. They often serve to excuse sexual aggression, create hostility toward victims, and bias criminal prosecution.
Attributions for poverty is a theory concerned with what people believe about the causes of poverty. These beliefs are defined in terms of attribution theory, which is a social psychological perspective on how people make causal explanations about events in the world. In forming attributions, people rely on the information that is available to them in the moment, and their heuristics, or mental shortcuts. When considering the causes of poverty, people form attributions using the same tools: the information they have and mental shortcuts that are based on their experiences. Consistent with the literature on heuristics, people often rely on shortcuts to make sense of the causes of their own behavior and that of others, which often results in biased attributions. This information leads to perceptions about the causes of poverty, and in turn, ideas about how to eradicate poverty.
Gang stalking or group-stalking is a set of persecutory beliefs in which those affected believe they are being followed, stalked, and harassed by a large number of people. The term is associated with the "targeted individual" ("T.I.") virtual community formed by like-minded individuals who claim their lives are disrupted from being stalked by organized groups intent on causing them harm.
Secondary victimisation refers to further victim-blaming from criminal justice authorities following a report of an original victimisation.
Outgroup favoritism is a social psychological construct intended to capture why some socially disadvantaged groups will express favorable attitudes toward social, cultural, or ethnic groups other than their own. Considered by many psychologists as part of a variety of system-justifying motives, outgroup favoritism has been widely researched as a potential explanation for why groups—particularly those disadvantaged by the normative social hierarchy—are motivated to support, maintain, and preserve the status quo. Specifically, outgroup favoritism provides a contrast to the idea of ingroup favoritism, which proposes that individuals exhibit a preference for members of their own group over members of the outgroup.
References
- ↑ The justice motive in everyday life By Melvin J. Lerner, Michael Ross, Dale T. Miller
- ↑ http://assets.cambridge.org/97805218/02154/frontmatter/9780521802154_frontmatter.pdf [ bare URL PDF ]
- ↑ Social Justice Research, ISSN 0885-7466 (Print), ISSN 1573-6725 (Online).
- ↑ Critical Issues in Social Justice, Melvin Lerner, Series Editor. ISSN 1572-1906.
- ↑ "Awards". International Society for Justice Research. Archived from the original on 7 August 2010. Retrieved 1 December 2010.
- 1 2 Montada, L. & Lerner, M.J. (1998). Preface, in Leo Montada & M.J. Lerner (Eds.). Responses to Victimizations and Belief in a Just World (pp. vii–viii). Plenum Press: New York.
- ↑ Lerner, M. J., & Simmons, C. H. (1966). Observer’s reaction to the "innocent victim": Compassion or rejection? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 4(2), 203–210.
- ↑ Lerner (1980). The Belief in a Just World: A Fundamental Delusion. Plenum: New York.
- ↑ Lerner, M. J., & Miller, D. T. (1978). Just world research and the attribution process: Looking back and ahead. Psychological Bulletin, 85(5), 1030–1051
- 1 2 Maes, J. (1998) Eight Stages in the Development of Research on the Construct of BJW?, in Leo Montada & M.J. Lerner (Eds.). Responses to Victimizations and Belief in a Just World (pp. 163–185). Plenum Press: New York.
