Affective disgust predicts blame for gay male homicide victims

For certain crimes there is a tendency in the United States to blame individuals for their victimization. Previous work has shown that affective states can impact blame attribution. Drawing upon this work, the purpose of the current pre-registered research was to examine the relation between affective disgust and victim blame attribution. In Study 1, as participants’ (N = 203) level of implicit disgust associations with gay men increased, their tendency to blame a gay male homicide victim also increased, whereas their agreement that the homicide qualified as a hate crime decreased. In Study 2, disgust was experimentally induced by exposing participants (N = 431) to disgusting (e.g., vomit, insects) or neutral images (e.g., mug, stapler). Inducing disgust increased victim blame and decreased perceptions that the homicide constituted a hate crime. However, exploratory mediation analyses in both studies showed that the impact of disgust on hate crime applications is best explained as an indirect effect of victim blame. Taken together, these findings suggest that both individual differences in implicit gay-disgust and situational feelings of disgust may underlie people’s perceptions of how blameworthy a victim is for the crime committed against them.