Carolyn Simmons
Carolyn H. Simmons is the second author of Lerner and Simmons (1966), the experiment in which observers rated a staged victim and which is the empirical root of research on victim derogation.
Who they are
This page is thin by design. The sources checked for this publication are the bibliographic record of the 1966 paper and an open-access copy of the paper itself. They establish her authorship and nothing about her career, affiliation or later work, and none of that is claimed here.
The paper, with Melvin Lerner as first author, reports an experiment in which seventy-two female undergraduates, from seventy-five volunteers, watched a ten-minute video of a woman who appeared to receive painful shocks. The paper is credited in later reviews as the first demonstration of victim derogation.
Key papers
Lerner, M. J., & Simmons, C. H. (1966). Observer's reaction to the 'innocent victim': Compassion or rejection? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 4(2), 203-210. doi:10.1037/h0023562.
Key ideas
The paper's result, as the authors read it, is that observers who expected a victim's suffering to continue and could not change it rated her lower, and that the ratings were lowest when she seemed to suffer for the observers' sake. The authors read the pattern as a need to believe that the world is just. A 2020 meta-analysis found that the average effect across 55 later studies is small. See Victim Derogation and Belief in a Just World.
Sources
- Lerner, M. J., & Simmons, C. H. (1966), doi:10.1037/h0023562. Dawtry, R. J., Callan, M. J., Harvey, A. J., & Gheorghiu, A. I. (2020), doi:10.1177/1088868320914208, for the later meta-analysis.