Reactions to victims and defendants of varying degrees of attractiveness

Detailed examination of the Landy & Aronson (1969) data on judging criminal behavior revealed a curious bias in which Ss’ impressions seemed to be considerably more negative toward an unattractive victim than toward an attractive victim, but only slightly more negative toward an unattractive defendant than toward an attractive defendant. The present experiment obtained statistical support for this interaction effect using four dependent measures: favorability of impression, similarity, identification, and trust. The findings were interpreted in terms of Lerners’s (1965) theory of the “belief in a just world” and with an expanded version of Walster’s (1966) “defensive attribution” theory.