Last week a film by Ksenia Sobchak was released about a cellist-swindler, whose victim was several women - beautiful, successful, undoubtedly possessing a sufficient level of critical thinking. Statements immediately appeared in the comments that they “themselves guilty”, “where were they looking”, “it was still completely obvious from the very beginning”, etc. This immediately brought back memories of the terrible case of the famous scientist Oleg Sokolov dismembering his graduate student - then many accused her of she became a victim - they say she knew who she was messing with, he was a typical abuser, how could she not see it. And if she saw him and stayed with him, that means she was to blame. Where does the conviction of many people come from that the victims themselves are to blame? Let's try to figure it out. Victim blaming is a special term that refers to blaming the victim, and we are talking not only about victims of crimes, deceptions, violence, but also about those who survived accidents associated with any disasters. For example, residents of Sochi, who some time ago experienced a hurricane and flood and lost their homes, were accused by many of the fact that they “should have thought when they built or bought houses in such places.” The logic of such accusers is very primitive: if something happened to a person misfortune means that a person behaved incorrectly in some way, made a wrong choice somewhere - and, therefore, is guilty. This effect is often called “white coat” (“You are all fools, but I’m standing beautiful in a white coat”). “Walking” a white coat is associated with magical thinking, when a person is confident that if he behaves correctly, nothing like this will happen to him. maybe those to whom this happened simply deserved: “why don’t such cases happen to me?”, “how could you not immediately understand what kind of person this is?” The fact is that many people who are not accustomed to reflect , the very idea that injustice can happen to others just like that, without any contribution from them, is very uncomfortable. Such a person seems to unconsciously reason: after all, if misfortunes happen chaotically, then they can happen to me? To protect themselves from such thoughts, people use the so-called concept of a just world. The American sociologist Melvin Lerner was the first to come to this conclusion when he studied the phenomenon of belief in a just world. In one of his experiments, he showed subjects a video recording of the learning process. In it, students (actors) were allegedly given electric shocks for making mistakes. Some of them could interrupt the lesson and leave, while others did not have this opportunity. Based on the results of a survey of those who observed the test, it was found that they treated those students who did not have the opportunity to interrupt the lesson and leave much worse than those who had such an opportunity and the student took advantage of it. Lerner wrote the following about this: “...the mere sight of an innocent person suffering without the possibility of reward or compensation motivates people to evaluate him lower in order to harmonize his character and destiny.” Belief in a just world is nothing more than a cognitive distortion that is expressed in the belief that people get what they deserve based on their qualities: the bad ones will sooner or later be punished, and the good ones will be rewarded. This is where the roots of complacency lie for those who are sure that “everything will come back like a boomerang” to their offenders. This is where the confidence comes from that the victims of deception are themselves to blame for what happened to them. Do specific people really have any predisposition to become targets of violence? For example, women who find abusive partners over and over again. There is a very fine line between blaming the victim and understanding that it can, in fact, partly cause a reaction of aggression in certain people who are prone to it (!). But very often the victim has no responsibility. Many specialists working with victims of abuse say that one of the few distinguishing features of such people is that they,.