RESEARCH

In my primary line of my research, I investigate the relationship between victim blame and perpetrator blame, including how one affects the other. My research shows that when it comes to victims and perpetrators, blame is zero-sum; when victims are seen as having contributed to the crime against them, this actively takes away from blame for the perpetrator. This discounting of perpetrator blame occurs because the victim is perceived as more deserving of what happened to them. The zero-sum nature of blame can be seen in plenty of real-world examples, when the defense of a perpetrator seems to focus on what the victim should have done differently.

See: Dyer, R. L., Pizarro, D. A., & Ariely, D. (2022). They had it coming: The relationship between perpetrator-blame and victim-blame. Social Cognition, 40(6), 503-527. https://doi.org/10.1521/soco.2022.40.6.503

I am also interested in how blame for both victims and perpetrators is driven by factors other than the actions contributing directly to the crime. Namely, I study the ways in which blame is shaped by perceptions of moral character and people’s emotional reactions towards the targets of blame. The same behavior can be viewed quite differently depending on whether it was carried out by a “good” or “bad” person—importantly, both victims and perpetrators can be perceived as either one. Observers may also look to their own emotional reactions to help inform their moral judgments. Anger and disgust directed towards the perpetrator, for example, contribute to an increase in perpetrator blame and a decrease in victim blame, whereas those same emotions directed towards the victim contribute to an increase in victim blame.

See: Fan, Q., Swoap, J., Krawshuk, A., & Dyer, R. L. (2023, February). Who we are vs. what we do: The relationship between moral character and blame. Poster presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Atlanta, GA. https://osf.io/y4sne

In two papers, both currently under review, I have also studied how people perceive violations of social/moral norms. From a cognitive framework, I have examined the moral foreign language effect (FLE): research has previously shown that when thinking/reading in a foreign (vs. native) language, people tend to be more morally lenient in their judgment of others. My research suggests that this moral FLE may occur because foreign language use inhibits cognitive access to social norms. From a more affective lens, my collaborators and I hypothesized that manipulating the personal relevance of a threat would influence the perceived immorality of that threat. Early evidence supports this hypothesis, with liberal participants finding a traditionally “conservative” norm violation (disrespecting an elder) more immoral after considering the personal relevance of such a violation.

See: Dyer, R. L., Herbst, N. R., Hintz, W., A., & Williams, K. E. G. (2023). Personal relevance affects the perceived immorality of politically-charged threats. PLoS One, 18(12), e0296177. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0296177

In some of my early work for my doctoral dissertation, I explored the chronic motivation to justify one’s own morally questionable behavior. More recently, I have been continuing to investigate this idea. I am interested in the effect of abstract (vs. concrete) thinking on both the formation of good intentions and the justification of bad behaviors.

See: Dyer, R. L. (2014). From good intentions to bad behavior: The role of motivation in moral decision-making. Doctoral dissertation, Yale University.