Belief in a Just World, Blaming the Victim, and Hate Crime Statutes

46 Pages Posted: 28 Apr 2006 Last revised: 24 Oct 2008

See all articles by Dhammika Dharmapala

Dhammika Dharmapala

UC Berkeley School of Law; CESifo (Center for Economic Studies and Ifo Institute); European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI)

Nuno Garoupa

George Mason University - Antonin Scalia Law School

Richard H. McAdams

University of Chicago Law School

Date Written: August 14, 2008

Abstract

The earliest economic theory of discrimination proposed the subsequently neglected idea of a "vicious circle" of discrimination (Myrdal,1944). We draw on psychological evidence (that people derive utility from believing that the world is just) to propose a behavioral economic model in which the vicious circle envisaged by Myrdal can arise. We demonstrate the power of this approach through an application to the issue of whether and how to justify penalty enhancements for hate crimes against members of disfavored groups. The crucial assumption is that individuals engage in biased inference in order to preserve their Belief in a Just World, thus attributing the disproportionate victimization of a group to that group's negative characteristics, rather than to the hate-motivated preferences of offenders. In a simple two-period setting, we show that disproportionate victimization of the disfavored group in the first period can lead to additional crime against that group in the second period. The reason is that potential offenders' inferences about the victimized group's characteristics become more negative as a consequence of disproportionate victimization, raising the net benefits of crime against that group (under the assumption that the benefits of crime depend partly on the victimized group's perceived characteristics). Our main result is that penalty enhancements can reduce the social harm due to these extra crimes.

Keywords: Hate crimes, behavioral economics

JEL Classification: K14, K42

Suggested Citation

Dharmapala, Dhammika and Garoupa, Nuno and McAdams, Richard H., Belief in a Just World, Blaming the Victim, and Hate Crime Statutes (August 14, 2008). U of Chicago Law & Economics, Olin Working Paper No. 438, Review of Law & Economics, 2008, U of Chicago, Public Law Working Paper No. 242, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=899416

Dhammika Dharmapala

UC Berkeley School of Law ( email )

302 JSP
2240 Piedmont Ave
Berkeley, CA 94720
United States

CESifo (Center for Economic Studies and Ifo Institute) ( email )

Poschinger Str. 5
Munich, DE-81679
Germany

European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI) ( email )

c/o the Royal Academies of Belgium
Rue Ducale 1 Hertogsstraat
1000 Brussels
Belgium

Nuno Garoupa

George Mason University - Antonin Scalia Law School ( email )

3301 Fairfax Drive
Arlington, VA 22201
United States

Richard H. McAdams (Contact Author)

University of Chicago Law School ( email )

1111 E. 60th St.
Chicago, IL 60637
United States
773-834-2520 (Phone)

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