Scapegoating

Abstract

Scapegoating is a type of social behavior in which the blame for a frustration or misfortune is displaced onto an individual or group that did not cause it. Cognitive and social psychology explain it through two mechanisms: the displacement of aggression away from its true but unavailable or too-powerful source, and the motivated selection of a substitute target that is visible, relatively powerless, and already disliked. A modern dual-motive model adds that people scapegoat for two distinct payoffs: relieving moral guilt and restoring a sense of control. This article traces the origin of scapegoating in frustration and displaced aggression, reviews how targets are chosen, sets out the dual-motive account, and surveys current work from conspiracy belief to pandemic blame. A worked example and three interactive demonstrations make the mechanism concrete.

Keywords: scapegoating, displaced aggression, frustration–aggression hypothesis, intergroup blame, dual-motive model

What Scapegoating Is

Scapegoating is the act of blaming a person or group for a problem they did not cause, and directing hostility toward them in place of the true but unavailable source. The word descends from the ancient ritual, described in Leviticus, in which the sins of a community were symbolically laid upon a goat that was then driven into the wilderness, carrying the guilt away. The modern psychological sense keeps the core structure — the transfer of blame to a substitute — while replacing the ritual with the ordinary cognitive and motivational processes that make such transfer attractive. MeSH defines it as a process in which the mechanisms of projection or displacement are used to focus feelings of aggression, hostility, and frustration upon another individual or group, with the amount of blame being unwarranted.

As a form of social behavior, scapegoating sits at the intersection of two older constructs that MeSH also uses to classify it: psychological displacement — the redirection of an impulse from its original object onto a safer one — and projection — the attribution of one's own unacceptable states to others. These are the classical defense mechanisms the ritual's structure mirrors, and the descriptor is filed under both as well as under social behavior, reflecting that scapegoating is at once an intrapsychic maneuver and an interpersonal, often intergroup, act.

What distinguishes scapegoating from ordinary blame is that the blame is misdirected and motivated. Correctly blaming the party responsible for a harm is not scapegoating; nor is an honest mistake about causation. Scapegoating occurs when the assignment of blame serves a psychological function for the blamer — discharging an aggressive impulse, relieving guilt, or restoring a sense of order — and the target is selected because it is suitable for that function rather than because the evidence points to it. This is why scapegoating is so resistant to correction by facts alone: the belief is doing work that the truth would leave undone.

The folk understanding treats a scapegoat simply as an innocent party who gets blamed. That captures the injustice but misses the systematic pattern psychology has documented: who becomes a scapegoat, when, and why is highly predictable. Scapegoats are drawn disproportionately from groups that are visible, relatively powerless, and already the object of prejudice, and the blame surges precisely when a population is frustrated, threatened, or stripped of control. A mechanistic account, developed in the sections that follow, explains both the innocence the folk picture notices and the selectivity it misses.

The Frustration–Aggression Origin

The psychological study of scapegoating begins with the frustration–aggression hypothesis, set out by John Dollard and colleagues at Yale in 1939 (Dollard et al., 1939). In its original and strongest form, the hypothesis held that frustration — the blocking of goal-directed activity — always produces some instigation to aggression, and that aggression is always traceable to prior frustration. The authors recognized that aggression is frequently not directed at the agent responsible for the frustration, because that agent may be unknown, unreachable, or too powerful to attack safely. In that case the aggressive impulse is displaced onto a substitute target — the germ of the scapegoating idea.

Neal Miller, one of the original authors, formalized the displacement mechanism using the principle of stimulus–response generalization (Miller, 1948). Aggression toward the original frustrator is driven by an instigation gradient but also opposed by an inhibition gradient (fear of retaliation); both fall off as targets become less similar to the original source, but the two gradients have different slopes. Where the net of instigation minus inhibition is highest — typically at some remove from the true source, among targets similar enough to attract the displaced impulse but dissimilar enough to escape the inhibition — is where displaced aggression lands. The model gives scapegoating a precise shape: the chosen target is rarely the actual frustrator and rarely someone wholly unrelated, but an intermediate figure onto whom the impulse generalizes while the restraints do not.

Leonard Berkowitz later reformulated the hypothesis to fit the evidence, which had shown the original every-frustration-produces-aggression claim to be too strong (Berkowitz, 1989). In his cognitive–neoassociationist account, it is aversive events in general — not frustration narrowly — that generate negative affect, and that affect primes aggression-related thoughts, memories, and impulses. Whether aggression actually follows, and toward whom, depends on cues in the situation that are associated with aggression or with the source of the distress. This reformulation matters for scapegoating because it explains why a target already linked, in the blamer's mind, to negativity or to the frustration itself is especially likely to be attacked: the association, not mere similarity, channels the impulse.

Displaced Aggression: The Evidence

For decades displaced aggression was theoretically central but empirically contested, and some reviewers doubted it existed at all. The question was settled by Ann Marcus-Newhall and colleagues, whose meta-analysis of forty-nine studies confirmed that displaced aggression is a robust phenomenon: when people cannot retaliate against the source of a provocation, they do direct aggression toward an innocent target, with an effect size that is reliably different from zero (Marcus-Newhall et al., 2000). The meta-analysis put the mechanism underlying scapegoating on firm empirical ground after a long period of doubt.

A refinement explains why displaced aggression is sometimes mild and sometimes grossly disproportionate. William Pedersen and colleagues demonstrated triggered displaced aggression: when a person who has been provoked earlier encounters a minor, trivial annoyance from a second, innocent party, the response to that small trigger is far more aggressive than the trigger alone would warrant (Pedersen et al., 2000). The initial provocation primes the system; the trivial trigger releases it onto the available target. This is the laboratory analogue of the scapegoat who is punished out of all proportion to anything they actually did — the small pretext is not the cause of the hostility but merely its occasion.

Norman Miller and colleagues integrated these findings into a theoretical model of triggered displaced aggression specifying the moderators that amplify or dampen it — the intensity of the initial provocation, the magnitude of the trigger, the similarity of the target to the original provocateur, and the target's membership in a disliked group (Miller et al., 2003). The model matters for scapegoating because it names the conditions under which an ordinary person, carrying an unresolved frustration, will lash out at a substitute: the account is not of exceptional cruelty but of a general process with identifiable inputs.

The DisplacementGradient demonstration below lets the instigation and inhibition gradients be adjusted to show where, across targets of varying similarity to the original frustrator, displaced aggression peaks.

From Individual to Intergroup: The Choice of Scapegoats

Scapegoating becomes historically consequential when the displaced target is not an individual but a whole social group. The earliest quantitative evidence came from Carl Hovland and Robert Sears, who correlated economic indices with the number of lynchings in the American South between 1882 and 1930 and found that lynchings rose as the price of cotton — and with it the economic fortunes of the region — fell (Hovland & Sears, 1940). The interpretation was textbook frustration–aggression at the societal scale: economic hardship frustrated a population that then displaced its aggression onto a visible, powerless minority. The original analysis was statistically crude, and Joseph Hepworth and Stephen West later reanalyzed the series with modern time-series methods, confirming a genuine though more modest negative relationship between economic conditions and lynchings once autocorrelation was properly handled (Hepworth & West, 1988). The reanalysis is a model of how a classic finding survives — qualified but intact — under rigorous scrutiny.

That a frustrated group displaces aggression onto an outgroup was shown experimentally by Neal Miller and Richard Bugelski, who found that frustrating participants increased the hostility they expressed toward outgroups they had not been in contact with and that had done nothing to them (Miller & Bugelski, 1948). But frustration explains the impulse, not the target. Why are some groups chosen as scapegoats again and again across centuries? Peter Glick's analysis of the scapegoating of Jews argues that the choice is not arbitrary but ideologically structured: successful scapegoats are cast through an envious prejudice as powerful, conspiratorial agents secretly responsible for a society's troubles, a narrative that makes even a relatively powerless minority appear to be the hidden cause of collective misfortune (Glick, 2002). In his broader treatment of the choice of scapegoats, Glick sets out the general conditions — shared frustration, a plausible ideological narrative, and a target already marked as different — under which a group is selected (Glick, 2005).

Gordon Allport had already identified the key properties in The Nature of Prejudice: a serviceable scapegoat is one that is safe to attack, readily available, highly visible, and the object of pre-existing antipathy, so that the displaced hostility meets little resistance and fits an existing stereotype (Allport, 1954). Ervin Staub's analysis of the roots of genocide places scapegoating on a continuum of destruction: difficult life conditions frustrate a population, scapegoating a vulnerable group provides a shared explanation and a target, and if unchecked the devaluation deepens through discrimination toward persecution and mass violence (Staub, 1989). Scapegoating, in this light, is not merely an individual coping maneuver but a social process with a trajectory.

Table 1 sets out the four factors that together make a group a serviceable scapegoat, the weight each carries in the suitability index used in the worked example below, and whether it is open to deliberate intervention.

The ScapegoatSelector demonstration below weighs a candidate group's visibility, powerlessness, prior dislike, and blameability into a suitability index, showing why some groups are chosen over others.

Why People Scapegoat: The Dual-Motive Model

Frustration and displaced aggression explain how scapegoating works, but a modern program led by Zachary Rothschild has clarified why it is so psychologically rewarding. Rothschild, Mark Landau, and colleagues proposed and tested a dual-motive model: scapegoating serves two distinct psychological needs, and which need is active changes what the scapegoat is for (Rothschild et al., 2012). The first is the guilt-reduction motive. When people feel responsible for a harm — when their own moral standing is threatened by their complicity in a problem — blaming an outgroup for that problem transfers the responsibility outward and relieves the guilt, protecting the self's moral image. The second is the control-restoration motive. When a misfortune has no clear cause and people feel a loss of control over it, identifying a culpable agent — even a wrongly accused one — restores the sense that the world is orderly and that the threat can be located and, in principle, countered.

The two motives make different predictions, which is the model's strength. Rothschild and colleagues showed that threatening participants' sense of personal moral responsibility for a problem increased their tendency to blame an outgroup, and, separately, that threatening their sense of control did the same through a different route (Rothschild et al., 2012). A related line connects the first motive to moral outrage: Rothschild and Lucas Keefer found that expressing outrage at a third-party wrongdoer can itself discharge guilt over one's own moral failings, functioning as a cleansing mechanism that buffers threats to moral identity (Rothschild & Keefer, 2017). Scapegoating and moralized blame, on this account, are tools for managing the self as much as weapons against the other.

The control-restoration route links scapegoating to conspiracy belief. Mirosław Kofta, Wiktor Soral, and Michał Bilewicz showed that experimentally inducing a sense of political uncontrollability and uncertainty increased belief in a Jewish conspiracy — the perception of a hidden, coordinated outgroup agent behind events (Kofta et al., 2020). Conspiracy scapegoating is control-restoration in its purest form: a frightening, diffuse loss of control is resolved by positing a single malevolent agent responsible for it, which is at once terrifying and oddly reassuring because it makes the chaos legible. Rothschild and Keefer later showed that stable individual differences — in guilt-proneness and in the need for control — moderate which motive drives a given person's scapegoating, so that the same social situation produces guilt-driven blame in some people and control-driven blame in others (Rothschild & Keefer, 2023).

The DualMotiveModel demonstration below lets the guilt threat and the control threat be varied independently, showing how each raises the predicted tendency to scapegoat through its own pathway.

Worked Example: A Scapegoat Suitability Index, and What Changes It

Figure 1

The psychology of target selection can be made quantitative with a simple linear model. Rate each of four factors that the literature identifies as making a group a serviceable scapegoat from 0 to 10, and combine them with weights that sum to 1, then scale to a 0–100 index. Using illustrative weights that give powerlessness and the plausibility of a blame narrative the most say:

suitability = 10 × (0.30·Weakness + 0.20·Visibility + 0.25·Dislike + 0.25·Blameability)

Here Weakness is the group's relative inability to retaliate, Visibility its distinctiveness and identifiability, Dislike the pre-existing antipathy toward it, and Blameability the plausibility of a narrative connecting it to the frustration. Take a candidate group that is quite powerless, clearly identifiable, moderately disliked, and embedded in a strong blame narrative: Weakness 8, Visibility 7, Dislike 6, Blameability 9. The weighted components are:

- Weakness: 0.30 × 8 = 2.40 - Visibility: 0.20 × 7 = 1.40 - Prior dislike: 0.25 × 6 = 1.50 - Blameability: 0.25 × 9 = 2.25

Their sum is 7.55 on the 0–10 scale, for a suitability index of 75.5.

Now consider what an intervention can realistically change. Three of the four factors are structural and slow to move: a group's visibility, its relative powerlessness, and the accumulated prior dislike cannot be altered on the timescale of a crisis. The one factor that responds to deliberate action is blameability — the plausibility of the narrative that pins the misfortune on the group. The control-restoration account predicts exactly this: scapegoating thrives on a senseless, unexplained threat, so supplying a credible, accurate account of the real cause removes the vacuum the blame narrative fills. Suppose such an account drops blameability from 9 to 3, leaving the three structural factors unchanged:

- Weakness: 0.30 × 8 = 2.40 (unchanged) - Visibility: 0.20 × 7 = 1.40 (unchanged) - Prior dislike: 0.25 × 6 = 1.50 (unchanged) - Blameability: 0.25 × 3 = 0.75

The new sum is 6.05, an index of 60.5 — a drop of 15.0 points, about 20%.

The arithmetic carries the article's main practical lesson. Scapegoating is not dismantled by defending the target's innocence in the abstract, because the structural factors that make the group suitable — its visibility and relative powerlessness — are exactly the features an appeal to fairness cannot quickly change. What can be changed is the narrative: supplying a true and legible account of why the misfortune happened drains the blameability that the other factors amplify. The index also shows the limit of this remedy. A group that is highly visible, powerless, and already disliked retains a substantial suitability score even when the blame narrative is fully countered, which is why scapegoating recurs against the same groups whenever a fresh crisis manufactures a new narrative.

Discussion

The cognitive psychology of scapegoating turns on separating two questions that the folk notion runs together: how the hostility arises, and why a particular target absorbs it. The frustration–aggression tradition answers the first — thwarted goals and aversive events generate an aggressive impulse that, blocked from its true source, is displaced (Dollard et al., 1939; Berkowitz, 1989; Marcus-Newhall et al., 2000). The intergroup and dual-motive literatures answer the second — targets are selected for their visibility, powerlessness, prior devaluation, and fit to a blame narrative, and the blame is retained because it relieves guilt and restores control (Allport, 1954; Glick, 2005; Rothschild et al., 2012). Together they convert scapegoating from an act of inexplicable cruelty into a process whose inputs can be named and, in principle, interrupted.

Two features of the account have outsized importance. The first is that scapegoating is motivated reasoning, not a mistake. The blame persists because it is doing psychological work — protecting the moral self, restoring a sense of agency — so it cannot be dislodged by evidence of the target's innocence alone. Any remedy that ignores the underlying motive leaves the motive free to find a new target. The second is that the dual-motive model makes the motive measurable and therefore addressable: guilt-driven scapegoating calls for routes to moral repair that do not require an external culprit, while control-driven scapegoating calls for restoring legitimate sources of control and supplying accurate causal accounts of the threat (Rothschild & Keefer, 2023; Kofta et al., 2020).

The account also clarifies why scapegoating is dangerous at scale. Because it offers a frustrated population a shared explanation, a locus of blame, and the satisfactions of restored control and discharged guilt all at once, it is readily mobilized by anyone who supplies the narrative — and because the same vulnerable groups score high on the structural factors of suitability, the blame falls on them repeatedly across unrelated crises. Staub's continuum of destruction is the warning: unopposed, the devaluation that begins as a coping maneuver can harden through discrimination into persecution (Staub, 1989).

Current Directions

Several active lines are extending the account. The clearest is the study of pandemic scapegoating. The COVID-19 pandemic was a natural experiment in control-threatened blame, and Christopher Seto's analysis of anti-Asian scapegoating for the pandemic examined the cultural and moral correlates of blaming Asian communities, linking the blame to perceptions of group belonging and to moral framing rather than to any causal reality (Seto, 2026). The episode is a textbook instance of the dual-motive model in the field: a diffuse, frightening, poorly understood threat met a visible and already-stereotyped target, and a blame narrative supplied the control the situation had stripped away.

A second line connects scapegoating to the psychology of conspiracy belief. The Kofta, Soral, and Bilewicz demonstration that political uncontrollability breeds belief in a coordinated outgroup conspiracy places conspiracy scapegoating within the control-restoration framework and suggests that the explosion of conspiratorial blame in uncertain times is not incidental but a direct expression of the same motive that drives classical scapegoating (Kofta et al., 2020). A third line, led by Rothschild and Keefer, is the move from average effects to individual differences: establishing that guilt-proneness and need for control moderate which motive governs a person's blame opens the way to targeted interventions that match the remedy to the motive actually operating (Rothschild & Keefer, 2023). Across all three, the through-line is a shift from documenting that scapegoating happens to modeling the specific conditions, motives, and individual differences that determine when and against whom it occurs, and the related research on prejudice toward immigrants shows the same targets absorbing displaced blame whenever a crisis supplies the narrative (Esses, 2021).

Common Misconceptions

A scapegoat is just anyone who happens to get blamed.

Scapegoating is selective, not random. Targets are disproportionately visible, relatively powerless, already disliked, and plausibly blameable within an available narrative, which is why the same vulnerable groups are blamed across unrelated crises (Allport, 1954; Glick, 2005).

Scapegoating is simply a mistake about who is responsible.

It is motivated, not merely erroneous. The blame persists because it serves a psychological function — relieving guilt or restoring a sense of control — so it resists correction by evidence of the target's innocence in a way an honest mistake would not (Rothschild et al., 2012).

People scapegoat only when they are angry.

Anger and displaced aggression are one route, but not the only one. The control-restoration motive produces scapegoating from fear and uncertainty rather than anger, which is why diffuse, frightening, poorly understood threats — not only infuriating ones — generate blame (Kofta et al., 2020).

Displaced aggression is a discredited idea.

For a time it was doubted, but a meta-analysis of forty-nine studies confirmed it as a reliable phenomenon: when the source of a provocation cannot be reached, aggression is directed toward an innocent substitute (Marcus-Newhall et al., 2000).

Glossary

Aggression.

Behavior intended to harm another; in scapegoating the aggressive impulse generated by frustration is redirected from its true source onto a substitute target.

Blameability.

The plausibility of a narrative connecting a candidate group to a misfortune; the one factor of scapegoat suitability that deliberate intervention can readily change.

Continuum of destruction.

Staub's account of how scapegoating of a vulnerable group under difficult life conditions can escalate, if unopposed, through devaluation and discrimination toward persecution and genocide.

Control-restoration motive.

The need to regain a sense of order and agency over a senseless misfortune by identifying a culpable agent responsible for it; one of the two motives in the dual-motive model.

Displaced aggression.

Aggression directed at a target other than the source of a provocation, because the source is unavailable, unknown, or too powerful to confront safely; the core mechanism of scapegoating.

Dual-motive model.

Rothschild and colleagues' account in which scapegoating serves two separable psychological needs — relieving moral guilt and restoring a sense of control — that make different predictions and call for different remedies.

Envious prejudice.

Glick's term for a prejudice that casts a group as competent but malign — powerful, cold, and conspiratorial — which makes even a relatively powerless minority a plausible scapegoat for collective misfortune.

Frustration–aggression hypothesis.

Dollard and colleagues' 1939 proposal that frustration produces an instigation to aggression which, when blocked from its source, is displaced onto a substitute; the origin of the psychological study of scapegoating.

Guilt-reduction motive.

The need to relieve the guilt of one's own moral failures by transferring responsibility for a problem onto an outgroup; one of the two motives in the dual-motive model.

Projection.

The defense mechanism of attributing one's own unacceptable impulses or states to others; one of the two classical mechanisms MeSH names in defining scapegoating.

Psychological displacement.

The redirection of an impulse from its original object onto a safer substitute; alongside projection, the mechanism through which scapegoating focuses hostility onto an unwarranted target.

Scapegoating.

The displacement of blame, and often aggression, onto an individual or group that did not cause a problem; classified by MeSH under social behavior, displacement, and projection.

Stimulus–response generalization.

The principle, used by Miller to formalize displacement, that a response conditioned to one stimulus transfers to similar stimuli, so that aggression generalizes from the frustrator to targets resembling it.

Triggered displaced aggression.

The disproportionately aggressive response to a minor, trivial annoyance from an innocent party when the responder has been provoked earlier and could not retaliate against the original source.

Key Researchers

Leonard Berkowitz

(University of Wisconsin–Madison, 1926–2016). Reformulated the frustration–aggression hypothesis into a cognitive–neoassociationist model, showing that aversive events prime aggression and that cues associating a target with the source of distress channel displaced aggression onto it. Wikipedia

Michał Bilewicz

(University of Warsaw). Researcher of conspiracy antisemitism and the conditions of political uncertainty and uncontrollability under which groups are blamed for collective misfortune, linking scapegoating to conspiracy belief. ORCID - Faculty page

Victoria M. Esses

(University of Western Ontario). Author of the instrumental model of group conflict and a leading program on when immigrants and refugees become targets of displaced blame for economic and social threat. ORCID - Faculty page

Peter Glick

(Lawrence University). Analyzed the choice of scapegoats, especially the envious prejudice and ideological narratives through which groups such as Jews are cast as powerful conspiratorial agents and blamed for societal crises. ORCID - Faculty page

Zachary K. Rothschild

(Bowdoin College). Developed the dual-motive model of scapegoating, distinguishing blame that relieves moral guilt from blame that restores control, and identified the individual differences that moderate each route. ORCID - Faculty page

Ervin Staub

(University of Massachusetts Amherst). Analyzed the roots of genocide and mass violence, placing scapegoating of a vulnerable group on a continuum of destruction as an early step from difficult life conditions toward persecution. Wikipedia

Frequently Asked Questions

What is scapegoating?

Scapegoating is blaming a person or group for a problem they did not cause, and directing hostility toward them in place of the true but unavailable, unknown, or too-powerful source. The term comes from the ancient ritual of laying a community's sins on a goat driven into the wilderness. In psychology it names the displacement of blame, and often aggression, onto a substitute target chosen because it is suitable for that purpose.

Where does scapegoating come from psychologically?

It grows out of the frustration-aggression hypothesis, proposed by Dollard and colleagues in 1939. Frustration and aversive events generate an impulse to aggression; when that impulse cannot be directed at its source, it is displaced onto a safer substitute. Later work by Miller formalized the displacement and by Berkowitz refined it to show that cues linking a target to the distress channel the impulse onto that target.

Is displaced aggression actually real?

Yes. Although it was doubted for a period, a meta-analysis of forty-nine studies by Marcus-Newhall and colleagues confirmed that displaced aggression is a reliable phenomenon: when people cannot retaliate against the source of a provocation, they aggress against an innocent target instead, with an effect reliably different from zero.

How are scapegoats chosen?

Not at random. Allport identified the key properties: a serviceable scapegoat is safe to attack, readily available, highly visible, and already disliked. Glick added that successful intergroup scapegoats are cast through an ideological narrative as powerful, conspiratorial agents responsible for a society's troubles, which is why the same vulnerable groups are blamed repeatedly.

Why do people scapegoat?

The dual-motive model identifies two reasons. The guilt-reduction motive: blaming an outgroup for a problem transfers responsibility outward and relieves the guilt of one's own complicity. The control-restoration motive: identifying a culpable agent for a senseless misfortune restores the sense that the world is orderly and the threat can be located. Different situations and different people engage one motive or the other.

What is the connection between scapegoating and conspiracy theories?

Conspiracy scapegoating is the control-restoration motive in its purest form. Kofta, Soral, and Bilewicz showed that inducing a sense of political uncontrollability increased belief in a coordinated outgroup conspiracy. Positing a single hidden agent behind frightening, diffuse events makes the chaos legible and so restores a feeling of control, even though the belief is false.

Can scapegoating be reduced?

Partly, and the worked example shows how. Three factors that make a group suitable (its visibility, relative powerlessness, and accumulated prior dislike) are structural and slow to change. The factor that responds to action is the blame narrative: supplying a credible, accurate account of a misfortune's real cause drains the plausibility of the accusation. Addressing the underlying guilt or control threat is necessary so the motive does not simply find a new target.

How does scapegoating lead to large-scale violence?

Staub placed it on a continuum of destruction. Difficult life conditions frustrate a population; scapegoating a vulnerable group supplies a shared explanation and a target; and if the devaluation is not opposed it can deepen through discrimination toward persecution and, in the gravest cases, genocide. Scapegoating is dangerous precisely because it offers a frustrated population explanation, blame, and relief all at once.

References

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