The Cultural Foundations of Sexism: When Women are Blamed for Being Mistreated

Women are still being mistreated and disadvantaged across the world. Moreover, women are not seldomly blamed for their own mistreatment. Such victim blaming serves to legitimize disadvantage and embed it within societal systems to the extent that maltreatment becomes culturally accepted. The present research aimed to unpackage the basic cultural values that may underlie victim blaming and sexism itself. Departing from the Community Collectivism-concept (Akkuş, Postmes & Stroebe, 2017), that assumes culture manifests itself in values central to communities, specifically preservation of group honour, maintenance of hierarchy within the group and the expectation of loyalty of its group members, while also allotting room for individual agency, we hypothesized that these same values may preserve sexist attitudes and behaviors. In two studies across three countries, Turkey (N=110), India (N=250) and Mexico (N=250), we tested to what degree the Community Collectivism Scale (CCS) can predict victim blaming, and how it compares to the Ambivalent Sexism Inventory (ASI) in that regard. Participants were presented scenarios of mistreatment of women, and a questionnaire to allocate responsibility. The results show that CCS-Collectivism was strongly correlated to victim blaming across all three countries, whereas Agency was strongly correlated to blaming perpetrator and society for the mistreatment. Especially with regard to predicting the allocation of blame to perpetrators of mistreatment and society, CCS outperformed ASI. The powerful prediction of Victim Blaming by CCS is not only of practical use, as an indication of its ability to predict sexism, but also reaffirms its conceptual foundations.