Can blaming victims of rape be logical? Attribution theory and discourse analytic perspectives

While it is frequently assumed that blaming the victims rather than the per petrators of rape is the result of biases in causal reasoning, one rape per ception study (Calhoun et al., 1976) suggests that blame attributions direc ted at the Victim can occur as a result of logical attributional processes through the systematic and rational application of the covariational rules of inductive reasoning. The aim of the present study was to investigate thi s assertion. The study is unique in two ways. First, participants were aske d to discuss a rape incident rather than evaluate it using questionnaire me thods. Second, the study focused on the rape of males as well as the rape o f females. Two analyses were performed on the conversational data - a conte nt analysis yielding quantitative data and a qualitative discourse analysis . The main findings were that, contrary to predictions, participants did no t use the covariation information to blame the victim of rape 'logically'. Instead,'the most frequently utilized category was 'meta-commentary' which showed that the participants were extremely sensitive to the inferences imp lied by the covariation information and the task in general. The findings a re discussed in relation to attribution theory and rape perception.