Do you have a victim mentality?

Leviathan Press:

I just saw the news that Zhu, the criminal in the "Shanghai wife-killing and corpse-hiding case", was executed last month. I won't go into the details of the case here. Interested students can search for relevant reports on their own. What I'm interested in is how many points Zhu would get if he answered the following "interpersonal victimization tendency" questions. In fact, it is not difficult to see from media reports and his confession that Zhu's lack of perception of other people's pain (empathy) is clearly reflected in him, and Zhu's mother's double-standard logic in defending her son after the incident is also speechless and shocking.

The "victim mentality" in this article is often those who inflict harm on others without knowing it. Not only that, they often feel that their "good deeds" are not understood, thus giving rise to the feeling of "others owe me". The manifestation of this anxious dependent personality is full of contradictions, but its internal logic is a self-consistent closed loop - thus, it becomes an "unconvincing person".
Quick Question: Rate your agreement with these questions on a scale of 1 ("strongly disagree") to 5 ("strongly agree").

What is more important to me is that the person who hurt me realizes the fact that I have been treated unfairly.
I feel that in my interactions with others, I treat them with more conscience and morality than they treat me.
When people around me feel that my behavior has hurt them, I feel the need to prove that I am right.
I often think about the injustices that others have done to me.

If you score high (4 or 5) on all of these questions, you may have what psychologists call a tendency for interpersonal victimhood.

Social ambiguity

Social life is a blur. Your date may or may not respond to your texts, your friends may or may not smile back at you when you smile at them, and strangers may or may not have unhappy looks on their faces. The question is: How do you interpret these situations? Do you see all of them as directed at you? Or do you consider more likely scenarios, like your friend is just having a bad day, your new date is still interested but trying to play it cool, and the stranger on the street is mad about something and doesn't even notice you're there?

While most people are able to overcome these social ambiguities relatively easily by regulating their emotions and accepting that it is an inevitable part of social life, some people tend to see themselves as perpetual victims.

Rahav Gabay and her colleagues define interpersonal victimhood as "a persistent sense of self-victimization that is pervasive across multiple relationships, such that victimization becomes a core part of one's identity." Those with a perpetual victimhood mindset tend to have an "external locus of control." They believe that a person's life is completely controlled by forces outside of the self, such as fate, luck, or the mercy of others.

(www.researchgate.net/publication/341548585_The_Tendency_for_Interpersonal_Victimhood_The_Personality_Construct_and_its_Consequences)

Through clinical observation and research, researchers have found that there are four main aspects of interpersonal victim tendencies:

(a) Continuously seeking recognition as a victim;

(b) moral elitism;

(c) lack of empathy for the suffering of others;

(d) Frequent rumination on past victimization experiences.

It is important to note that the researchers do not equate experiencing trauma with having a victim mentality. They note that a victim mentality can develop without experiencing severe trauma or victimization. Vice versa, experiencing severe trauma or victimization does not necessarily mean that a person will develop a victim mentality. However, victim mentality and victimization behavior share similar psychological processes and outcomes.

Furthermore, the four characteristics of the victim mentality identified by the experts are at the individual level (the results were obtained from a sample of Israeli Jews). Therefore, the results may not necessarily apply to the group level. However, there is literature that suggests that at the collective level, the two victim mentality have some striking similarities (which I will point out below).

With these caveats in mind, let’s take a closer look at the main characteristics of the perpetual victim mentality.

Victim mentality

Constantly seeking recognition as a victim.

People who score high on this dimension have a perpetual need to have their suffering acknowledged. Generally, this is a normal psychological response to trauma. Experiencing trauma often requires breaking down our assumptions that the world is a just and moral place. Acknowledging one's own victimhood is a normal response to trauma, and it helps a person rebuild confidence that the world is a fair and just place to live.

In addition, it is normal for victims to want their abusers to take responsibility for their wrongdoings and to express guilt. Research on patient and therapist testimonies has found that acknowledging the patient's trauma is important in developing recovery from trauma and victimization.

(www.researchgate.net/publication/15034528_Guilt_An_Interpersonal_Approach)

Moral elitism.

Those who score high on this dimension believe that they are on the moral high ground and that everyone else is immoral. Moral elitism can control others by accusing them of being immoral, unfair, or selfish, while viewing themselves as the "moral emperor."

(journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0533316414545707)

Moral elitism often develops as a defense mechanism against deeply painful emotions and becomes a way to maintain a positive self-image. As a result, those in distress often deny their own aggressive and destructive impulses and project them onto others. The "other" is seen as a threat, while the self is seen as persecuted, vulnerable, and morally superior.

(journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0533316414545843)

While people who divide the world into "saints" and "demons" may protect themselves from pain and damage to their self-image, this mentality ultimately stunts growth and development and ignores the ability to see the complexity of ourselves and society.

Lack of empathy for the pain and suffering of others.

People who score high on this dimension are so focused on their own victimhood that they are blind to the pain and suffering of others. Research shows that people who have just been wronged, or who remember being wronged in the past, feel entitled to behave aggressively and selfishly, ignoring the pain of others, taking it all for themselves, and leaving others with no recourse. Emily Zitek and her colleagues suggest that such people may feel that they have suffered enough, so they no longer feel obligated to care about the pain and suffering of others. As a result, they pass up opportunities to help others in their own right.

(pdfs.semanticscholar.org/34ae/fcaa1b7f3c7ca7c968bbe5294bdf8d2e951d.pdf)

And at the group level, research shows that increased focus on in-group victims reduces empathy for rival groups and unrelated rivals. Even the mere suggestion of victimization increases ongoing conflict. This mindset leads to reduced empathy for the adversary. People are reluctant to accept large amounts of collective guilt for the current harm. In fact, research on “competitive victimhood” shows that group members involved in violent conflict tend to view their victims as exclusive and tend to minimize, belittle, or outright deny the pain and suffering of their rivals.

(www.jstor.org/stable/20447126) (journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1088868312440048)

If a group is completely focused on its own suffering, it will develop what psychologists call "egoism of victimhood", that is, members are unable to see things from the perspective of the rival group, cannot or are unwilling to sympathize with the suffering of the rival group, and are unwilling to take any responsibility for the harm caused by their own group.

Frequently reflect on past experiences of victimization.

Those who score high on this dimension continually ruminate and talk about the interpersonal transgressions they have committed and their causes and consequences, rather than thinking about or discussing possible solutions. This may include anticipating future aggressive behavior based on past aggression that occurred. Research shows that victims tend to ruminate on the interpersonal transgressions they have experienced, and this rumination increases the drive to seek revenge, which in turn reduces the drive to seek forgiveness.

At the group level of analysis, victimized groups tend to reflect on their traumatic events frequently. For example, the prevalence of Holocaust material in Israeli Jewish school curricula, cultural products, and political discourse has increased over the years. While modern Israeli Jews are not typically direct victims of the Holocaust, Israelis are increasingly concerned about the Holocaust and fear that it could happen again.

(citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.882.1430&rep=rep1&type=pdf)

Consequences of a victim mentality

In interpersonal conflicts, each party is motivated to maintain a positive moral self-image. Therefore, different parties are likely to produce two very different subjective realities. The offender tends to downplay the seriousness of the violation, while the victim tends to view the offender's motives as arbitrary, stupid, and immoral, and more serious.

Therefore, the mindset that a person develops as a victim or perpetrator has a fundamental impact on how people perceive and remember situations. Gabay and her colleagues identified three main cognitive biases that characterize interpersonal victim tendencies: interpretation bias, attribution bias, and memory bias. All three biases make people less willing to forgive others.

Let’s take a closer look at these biases.

Explaining bias

The first type of interpretation bias involves the perceived offensiveness of social situations. The researchers found that people with higher interpersonal victimization tendencies rated both low-severity offenses (such as a lack of helpfulness) and high-severity offenses (such as offensive remarks about their integrity and character) as more serious.

The second interpretation bias involves the expectation of harm in ambiguous situations. The researchers found that people who were more likely to be harmed in interpersonal relationships were also more likely to believe that their department’s new manager would not care about them as much and would not be as willing to help them before meeting them.

Attribution of harmful behavior

Those with interpersonal victimization tendencies were also more likely to attribute negative intent to perpetrators and to experience greater intensity and longer duration of negative emotions following the victimization event.

These findings are consistent with research showing that people’s perceptions of whether an interpersonal interaction is harmful is often related to their perception that the harmful behavior was proactive. Compared with those who score lower in interpersonal victim tendencies, people with interpersonal victim tendencies are more likely to feel offended because they perceive the offender to be more malicious.

(journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0093650205277319)

This bias has been found to exist at the group level as well. Social psychologist Noa Schori-Eyal and colleagues found that people who scored high on a scale called “permanent in-group victimization orientation,” which measures the belief that one feels continually victimized and persecuted by different enemies at different times within their group, were more likely to categorize other groups as hostile to their own group and to respond more quickly to such categorizations (suggesting that such categorizations are more automatic). People who scored high on this scale were also more likely to attribute malevolent intent to other group members in ambiguous situations. When they were reminded of historical group trauma, they were more likely to attribute malevolent intent to other groups.

(www.researchgate.net/publication/317777288_Perpetual_ingroup_victimhood_as_a_distorted_lens_Effects_on_attribution_and_categorization)

Notably, in their study, even though the majority of participants were Israeli Jews, there was still a lot of variation in how much people endorsed in-group victim tendencies. This is further evidence that just because someone is a victim, it doesn’t mean they have to see themselves as a victim. The victim mentality is different from someone who has actually experienced collective or interpersonal trauma, and there are many people who have experienced the same trauma but refuse to see themselves as perpetual in-group victims.

Memory Bias

People with stronger interpersonal victimization tendencies also had a greater negative memory bias. They recalled more words that represented aggressive behavior and feelings of hurt (e.g., “betrayal,” “angry,” “disappointment”) and were more likely to recall negative emotions. Interpersonal victimization tendencies were not associated with positive interpretations, attributions, or recall of positive emotion words, but rather, negative stimuli activated a victimization mindset. These findings are consistent with previous research that has found that rumination increases negative recall and perception of events in different psychological contexts.

(citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.336.1616&rep=rep1&type=pdf)

At the group level, groups are likely to acknowledge and remember events that have had the greatest impact on them, including events in which the group was harmed by another group.

forgive

The researchers also found that people who were easily victimized in their relationships were less willing to forgive their perpetrators after being victimized, expressed a stronger desire for revenge beyond avoidance, and were actually more likely to retaliate. The researchers suggest that one possible explanation for low avoidance tendencies is that people who score higher on interpersonal victimization tendencies have a higher need for approval. Importantly, this effect was mediated by cognitive perspective, which was negatively correlated with interpersonal victimization tendencies.

Similar findings were found at the group level. Stronger feelings of collective victimization were associated with lower willingness to forgive and greater desire for revenge. This conclusion was confirmed in different contexts, including reflections on the Holocaust, the conflict in Northern Ireland, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The origin of mentality

Where does a victimhood mentality come from? On an individual level, there are certainly many different factors that come into play, including a person’s past experiences with actual victimization. However, the researchers found that an anxious attachment personality was a particularly strong antecedent of interpersonal victimization tendencies.

Anxiously attached people tend to rely on others for approval and constant affirmation. They constantly seek reassurance out of doubt about their own social worth. This causes anxiously attached people to view others in a highly ambivalent way.

On the one hand, anxiously attached people anticipate rejection from others. On the other hand, they need to rely on others to validate their self-esteem and worth. As for the direct link between anxious attachment and interpersonal victimization, the researchers noted, "From a motivational perspective, interpersonal victimization appears to provide anxiously attached individuals with an effective framework for constructing unstable relationships with others, including gaining attention, sympathy, and evaluation from others, while experiencing and expressing difficult negative emotions in interpersonal relationships."

At the group level, Gabay and her colleagues point to the potential role of socialization processes in the development of a collective victimhood mentality. They note that, like human beliefs, victimhood can be learned. Through many different channels, such as education, television shows, and social media, group members can learn that victimhood can be used as a power play and that aggression can be legal and fair even if one party is harmed. People may learn that internalizing a victimhood mentality can give them power over others and protect them from any consequences of online harassment and shaming that might be imposed on perceived out-group members.

(journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1088868315607800)

From victim to growth

The fact is that we currently live in a culture where many political and cultural groups and individuals emphasize their victimhood and participate in the "Victim Olympics" together. Charles Sykes, author of A Nation of Victims: The Decay of the American Character, suggests that this phenomenon stems in part from a sense of entitlement for groups and individuals to pursue happiness and fulfillment. Building on Sykes, Gabay and her colleagues note that "when these feelings of entitlement are combined with high levels of victimization at the individual level, struggles for social change are more likely to take on aggressive, demeaning, and condescending forms."

But here’s the thing: if socialization processes can instill a victim mentality in individuals, surely the same processes can also instill a personal growth mindset in people. What if we learned at a young age that our trauma didn’t have to define us? That victimhood didn’t form the core of our identity after experiencing trauma? Would it even be possible for us to grow from trauma and become a better person, using the experiences in our lives to try to instill hope and possibility in others who are in similar situations? What if we all learned that we can maintain pride in a group without hating others? What if we learned that to expect kindness from others, we need to be kind ourselves? What if we learned that no one is entitled to anything, but that we deserve to be treated as human beings?

This would be a pretty big paradigm shift, but it would be consistent with the latest social science that a perpetual victim mentality causes us to see the world through a filter. Once the filter is removed, we can see that “those who are not of my kind must be different” is not true, and that no one in our group is a saint. We are all human, with the same underlying needs to belong, to be seen, to be heard, and to have meaning.

Seeing reality as clearly as possible is an important step toward lasting change, and I believe an important step on that path is moving away from a perpetual victim mentality to something more productive, constructive, hopeful, and willing to build positive relationships with others.

By Scott Barry Kaufman

Translated by Sue

Proofreading/boomchacha

Original article/www.scientificamerican.com/article/unraveling-the-mindset-of-victimhood/

This article is based on a Creative Commons License (BY-NC) and is published by Sue on Leviathan

The article only reflects the author's views and does not necessarily represent the position of Leviathan