Hate Crime Victim Derogation Study

Agency: William & Mary (BOV) 
Type: Expendable 
Fund Name: Hate Crime Victim Derogation Study 
Purpose: To provide support for a study on the impact of hate crime victim derogation in racial bias. Unspent monies may be used for future student research within the department. 
Fund Administrator: Chair, Psychological Sciences 
Goal: $1,000 
Goal Not Met: Continue fundraising 
Goal Exceeded: Include more participants 

With an explosive surge of racial hate crime reported in North America since the pandemic, it is timely and crucial to ask whether that could leave us harmful effects in the long term. Based on the Belief in a Just World theory (Lerner, 1966), which asserts that people derogate the victims of unjust incidents to hold our fundamental delusion that the world is a just place where good people get good outcomes, previous studies have proved that BJW predicts the derogation of victims of unexpected crimes such as rape (e.g.,Kleinke & Meyer, 1990). 

However, not many studies have dealt with either hate crime or longer-lasting effect of victim derogation. Our project aims to reveal the danger of victim derogation using real video footage of hate crime incidents and testify whether the victim derogation happens after exposure to the hate crime, and if this extends to the discriminatory behaviors in real life.

It is crucial to be able to recruit adult participants to increase the generalizability of this study result as students at William and Mary does not represent the characteristics of American population. According to studies conducted in our lab, William and Mary students tend to be more liberal, hold favorable attitudes toward African American, while national samples are more conservative, older, and spent shorter years in education. Tribe funding will be used to recruit national samples, so we can find the impact of victimization when it comes to samples who have similar characteristics to the American population. 

Donors will be updated by email once or twice in a semester, about the research progress and its status in regards to publication, conference, or public outreach if there is any. Thank you for your consideration and for supporting our research!