Vicarious Comparative Victimhood: Introducing a Framework to Illustrate Vicariously Experienced Inequalities in Behaviors Toward Members of Victimized Groups

Building on and extending extant approaches like competitive victimhood, this theoretical contribution introduces a novel framework on vicarious comparative victimhood. When individuals who support others from specific disadvantaged victimized out-groups observe particular unjust treatment of those they support, as compared to other victimized out-groups, they may experience comparative victimhood vicariously. In these cases, social aides supporting discriminated others may identify violations to their firmly held moral beliefs, that is, injunctive, and, arguably to a lesser extent, descriptive antiprejudice norms of treating others equally, regardless of the others' group membership. We argue in our framework that, depending on the extent to which social aides experience comparative victimhood vicariously, they display different levels of psychological responses that may, at first sight, seem diametrically opposed like frustration or reactance. Which kind of psychological response social aides exhibit largely depends on moderators on the individual level concerning the social aides' personality and on the context level. Vicarious experiences of comparative victimhood may have severe behavioral consequences for the social aides' efforts, possibly even leading to discontinuation of their efforts in supporting others from disadvantaged victimized groups. In turn, such consequences may jeopardize societal cohesion and social peace. We outline specific testable research propositions, mainly by exemplifying this concept with references to social aides who work with and support refugees from different regions of origin, with the hopes of stimulating future empirical work on vicarious comparative victimhood.