Presenter: Rebecca Baldwin
Faculty Advisor: Cathy Crosby-Currie
229-6758, pantera180@aol.com

Poster Presentation

Previous research has suggested that people tend to evaluate non-victims more positively than victims, but several factors influence these evaluations.  One hundred and thirty three students from St. Lawrence University evaluated a vignette character on 18 character evaluation items and five victim items, in one of three scenarios (healthy, cancer, rape). Participants also completed the Global Belief in a Just World Scale (GBJWS), the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale, the Balanced Empathy Scale, and five religiousness items.  Preliminary analyses revealed a main effect for scenario, such that the healthy character was seen as less of a victim than the cancer or rape characters, but no difference was found on the character evaluation score.  Additionally, no main effect for GBJWS scores was found on character evaluation scores, but those high on GBJWS rated the cancer character as less victimized and the rape character as more victimized than those low on GBJWS.