Scapegoating

Primary bias

In-group / out-group bias: people naturally sort the world into "us" and "them," and directing anger at "them" feels easier than sitting with the discomfort of not knowing what actually caused a problem.

Secondary biases

Just-world bias: the belief that bad things don't happen for no reason, so something or someone must be responsible, even when the real explanation is structural or messy.

Fundamental attribution error: explaining a group's supposed behavior by their character, rather than by circumstance, makes the blame feel more deserved.

Dissonance reduction: not knowing why something bad is happening is uncomfortable. A named cause, even a wrong one, resolves that discomfort fast.

How it activates

1. A real hardship builds: a downturn, a lost war, a crime wave, a housing shortage.
2. A leader or outlet names a specific, already somewhat unfamiliar or disliked group as the cause.
3. The claim gets repeated and dramatized with vivid stories, whether or not they're verified.
4. Anger that had nowhere to go now has a target, and venting it feels like relief.
5. Punishing or excluding the target starts to feel justified instead of cruel.

Susceptibility factors

Strong: economic anxiety or instability.

Strong: existing prejudice toward the target group.

Moderate: a felt threat to the in-group's social status.

Moderate: the absence of a trusted alternative explanation.

What does not predict it

Intelligence or education level. Scapegoating runs on managing an uncomfortable emotion, not on reasoning ability, which is why well-educated audiences fall for it just as often once the underlying frustration is strong enough.

Primary purpose

Deflect accountability and mobilize. It moves blame away from the propagandist or the real causes, and pulls the audience together around a shared enemy.

Immediate effect

Relief and clarity. The confusing question "why is this happening" gets swapped for the far more satisfying "I know who did this."

Long-term effect

Hostility toward the target group deepens, scrutiny of the real causes erodes, and discrimination or even violence against the target can start to feel reasonable rather than extreme.

Cui bono

Whoever would otherwise be blamed for the problem, especially leaders or parties facing instability such as a recession, a lost war, or a difficult election.

Offensive or defensive

Both at once. It attacks the target group directly, and it defends the propagandist's own reputation by redirecting attention away from their role in the problem.

How it works

Setup: a real, large-scale problem exists with causes too complicated to explain in one sentence. Delivery: a target is picked that's identifiable, somewhat distinct from the in-group, and not powerful enough to push back effectively. Effect: confusion and anger both resolve at once, against that target.

Preconditions

Some existing tension or unfamiliarity with the target group, a crisis creating real uncertainty, and a trusted authority or media source willing to do the pointing.

When it fails

It tends to fail when the audience already has a trusted, direct relationship with the target group, when fact-checkers debunk the specific claim quickly with named evidence, or when the gap between the claim and visible reality is too obvious to ignore.

Amplifiers

Repetition, endorsement from a high-status or trusted figure, crisis conditions that raise emotional stakes, and existing stereotypes the new claim can simply slot into rather than build from scratch.

Natural habitat

Resources needed

Low to medium. A single influential speaker or outlet, repeated over time, is often enough. It doesn't need the production budget or coordination some other techniques require.

Scale dependency

It can work from one high-profile claim, but repetition strengthens it considerably, since each retelling makes the claim feel more familiar and therefore more believable.

Digital mutation

Social media lets one unverified anecdote reach millions before any fact-check can catch up, and algorithmic ranking tends to reward whichever version of the claim is most emotionally charged, not whichever version is most accurate.

First documented use

The word comes from the ancient Yom Kippur ritual, where a goat symbolically carrying a community's sins was driven into the wilderness. As a political mechanism rather than a ritual, it shows up across recorded history, but its modern scientific study traces to the frustration-aggression hypothesis developed at Yale University in 1939.

Named and theorised by

John Dollard, Leonard Doob, Neal Miller, O. H. Mowrer and Robert Sears, psychologists who published "Frustration and Aggression" in 1939, building on Sigmund Freud's earlier idea of displaced aggression. Gordon Allport, social psychologist, later extended the model in his research on prejudice, and Leonard Berkowitz, psychologist, revised it again in 1989.

Tradition

Spans the Western rhetorical and political tradition and academic social psychology, and was also a defining feature of twentieth-century totalitarian state propaganda.

Key evolution

Pre-mass-media versions show up as religious or ethnic scapegoating, including medieval European communities blaming Jewish populations for plagues. In the mass-media era, state-controlled press and radio scaled the same mechanism to entire nations, as with Nazi Germany's "stab-in-the-back" myth (see Section 07). In the social-media era, a single unverified anecdote can do the same emotional work without any state apparatus at all, spreading through shares rather than broadcast towers.

Cross-cultural notes

German-language propaganda scholarship, shaped by the country's post-1945 reckoning with Nazi history, treats this exact mechanism as close to its central case study, and the German term Sündenbock draws on the identical biblical image as the English word.

Pre-bunking note

General inoculation theory research, including work by Sander van der Linden, psychologist at the University of Cambridge, shows that explaining a manipulation technique to people before they encounter it makes them noticeably more resistant when they do. This research is broader than scapegoating specifically, but the mechanism applies directly: knowing the pattern in advance helps people catch it in the moment.

Backfire risk

Real. Correcting a scapegoating claim can backfire if it lands as an accusation against the listener, for example "you're racist for believing this," rather than as a factual correction. People often resist a correction that threatens their identity rather than updating their belief, even when the evidence is clear.

Commonly paired with

Blame first, then dehumanize: once a group has been named as the cause of a problem, language stripping it of full human status often follows, making harsher treatment feel justified rather than cruel.

Often precedes

Dehumanization campaigns, which build on the blame this technique establishes.

Often follows

A real crisis, an economic collapse, a lost war, a pandemic, that creates the frustration scapegoating then redirects onto a target.

Gets confused with

Primary sources

Accessible reading