Scapegoat Theory In Psychology

What is Scapegoating?

Scapegoating is the act of blaming an out-group when the frustration of the in-group experience is blocked from obtaining a goal (Allport, 1954).

Scapegoating is a way to analyze negative experiences by blaming an innocent individual or group for what happened. The blame becomes an outlet.

The person or group doing the scapegoating can then use the scapegoat’s mistreatment as an outlet for their own frustrations and hostilities.

The word scapegoat combines the archaic verb scape, meaning escape, with goat. It is a misreading of the Hebrew ʽazāzēl. William Tyndale, translating the Hebrew Bible into English, is credited with coining the term in the 16th century.

Historians believe it described the ritual animals onto which Jewish communities symbolically placed their sins. This was done in preparation for Yom Kippur.

The Book of Leviticus describes the sacrifice of these goats by throwing them off rocky headlands — the Azazel — who had symbolically carried the community’s sins. Celebrants believed the ritual would bring atonement.

Durkheim’s Scapegoat Theory

The first person to talk about scapegoating in a sociological context was Émile Durkheim (Mestrovic, 2015). His work was supplemented by his followers Marcel Mauss, Henri Hubert, Robert Hertz, and Paul Fauconnet.

Durkheim put forth a theory of scapegoating that connects perspectives in sociology, anthropology, psychology, law, and religion.

Durkheim’s Piacular Rites and Fauconnet’s Extension

Durkheim believed that a piacular event — any misfortune that causes disquiet and fear — threatens both the individual and society with disintegration. Communities respond with piacular rites. These are rituals of blame, sacrifice, and scapegoating that restore lost stability.

The most common piacular event in social life, Durkheim believed, is death. Someone or something must be blamed for every death.

A heart attack might follow years of smoking and poor diet; a fatal crash, a drunk driver’s inattention. What matters is the ritual of assigning blame, not whether the accusation is accurate.

Fauconnet (1920) built on Durkheim’s insight. He argued that, historically, animals and inanimate objects, as well as people and groups, have been blamed, condemned, and punished as a way to atone for death.

Animals and insects, for example, were killed and driven out of European countries as scapegoats for plague and other misfortunes.

Fauconnet went further still. He argued that all legal systems, throughout history, rest on one idea: someone or something must be sacrificed and made to suffer to create justice after a perceived misfortune.

This is not because the accused are objectively responsible. Responsibility simply has to fall on someone or something (Mestrovic, 2007). The same Durkheimian logic explains the Puritans’ persecution of Native Americans covered later in this article — collective atonement, not accurate blame.

Types of Scapegoating

Sociologists generally recognize four ways in which scapegoating takes place and through which scapegoats are created:

1. Individual-to-Individual: One person blames another for something they did — often seen among children who blame a sibling or friend to avoid the shame of disappointing their parents and the punishment that may follow (Hammer, 2007).
2. Individual-to-Group: One person blames a whole group — racial, ethnic, religious, or class-based — for a problem the group did not cause, such as attributing job loss to immigrants from a particular country (Hammer, 2007).
3. Group-to-Individual: A group singles out and blames one person for a problem, such as a sports team blaming one player for a loss, or a group of voters blaming a single political figure for undelivered promises (Hammer, 2007).
4. Group-to-Group: One group blames another for a problem the whole group is experiencing, often economic or political and organised along lines of race, ethnicity, religion, or national origin — the case sociologists find most interesting (Hammer, 2007).

The Frustration–Aggression Hypothesis (Dollard et al., 1939)

Scapegoating’s psychological engine is the frustration–aggression hypothesis, proposed by Dollard, Doob, Miller, Mowrer, and Sears (1939). Their claim was bold. Aggression, they argued, always presupposes frustration, and frustration always leads to some form of aggression.

This mechanism places scapegoating among the individual-level explanations of prejudice, alongside the authoritarian personality tradition discussed later in this article. It sits apart from theories that instead locate the cause of hostility in relations between groups.

The Core Proposition

Dollard, Doob, Miller, Mowrer, and Sears (1939) proposed the hypothesis in a strong, two-way form: aggression always presupposes frustration, and frustration always produces aggression.

Frustration means the blocking of goal-directed activity — anything that stands between a person and an expected reward. The theory’s key move is displacement.

When the source of frustration is too powerful to confront — a parent, an employer, a landlord, the state — the aggressive impulse cannot be released against it directly.

The same is true when the cause is too diffuse to identify. Economic hardship, for instance, has no single person to blame.

Instead, the impulse is redirected onto a safer, substitute target: someone with less power who is available and safe to blame. Both routes end the same way — the drive finds a target that was never the actual cause.

Catharsis and Its Limits

The original theory borrowed from psychoanalysis: aggression works like a reservoir of energy that needs an outlet. Displacing it onto a scapegoat should bring catharsis — discharging the drive and lowering the pressure to aggress again. This idea explained why scapegoating recurs. Each new frustration refills it, inviting fresh release.

That prediction turned out to be wrong.

But the strong claim did not survive scrutiny. Frustration does not always cause aggression — more often it produces anger, or simply a readiness to aggress. That readiness is only acted on when the situation allows it, such as whether the frustrator could retaliate or whether aggressive cues are present.

Researchers also found that catharsis works backwards: expressing aggression tends to raise, not lower, later aggression, undermining the hydraulic model. And frustration is not the same as mere deprivation.

It is the thwarting of an expected reward, not the lack of a good, that provokes aggression. That is one reason a discrepancy between what people have and what they feel entitled to predicts collective aggression better than absolute want.

These limits did not discard the hypothesis. They motivated the reformulation covered later in this article’s Critical Evaluation.

Scapegoating and Displaced Aggression

Scapegoating is somewhat consistent with Sigmund Freud’s notions of displacement or projection as defense mechanisms (Hammer, 2007).

Displacement and Projection

Displacement is the term for redirecting a feeling from its real target onto a safer one. Freud named it first. According to Freud, people displaced hostility toward unacceptable targets — such as their parents or their boss — onto less powerful ones. The target was never the true cause.

Projection works differently: it is attributing one’s own unacceptable feelings or anxieties to someone else, denying them within oneself. Both mechanisms, Freud argued, protect people from illicit desires or fears by rejecting unacceptable feelings toward authority.

The target of their displacement may become a scapegoat (Hammer, 2007). The scapegoat had done nothing.

More recently, sociologists have used the idea of displaced aggression to describe the tendency to scapegoat. A woman who has just had a fight with her boyfriend, for example, may kick her dog for minor misbehavior when she gets home. The timing was pure chance.

The dog becomes the scapegoat, paying the price for a fight it played no part in. The true cause of the aggression — the boyfriend — goes unpunished. A safer target — the dog, unable to retaliate — takes the hit instead.

Relative Deprivation

The same logic works at the group level.

Sociologists have also used relative deprivation to explain the tendency to scapegoat. The idea is simple. People feel negative emotions when they believe they are being treated poorly for illegitimate reasons.

Someone who learns a colleague got a raise after befriending the manager, for example, may feel deprived by comparison. That sense of unfairness, not the raise itself, is what breeds resentment toward the colleague (Hammer, 2007).

Intergroup Conflict

Scapegoating between groups has long been used to explain social, economic, or political problems that are actually harming the group doing the blaming. The true cause goes unchallenged.

Often, the people engaging in scapegoating are said to be experiencing prolonged economic insecurity and come to adopt shared beliefs that can lead to prejudice and violence.

Who Becomes a Scapegoat?

Researchers have identified the conditions under which a group is most likely to be scapegoated. Power matters most: the scapegoated group tends to have lower power than the group doing the blaming, since a stronger group could otherwise resist being blamed.

Distinctiveness matters too. The scapegoated group tends to be clearly distinct from the ingroup, which makes it easy to identify. It also tends to pose at least the appearance of a real threat, whether or not that threat is genuine (Hammer, 2007).

A third factor also matters: categorisation.

Kessler and Mummendey (2001) add a further condition: categorisation. Their research found that an individual grievance escalates into intergroup hostility specifically when people’s sense of belonging to a larger social category becomes salient. An injustice done to one person is then reframed as an injustice done to “us” by “them.”

Which group is chosen, though, is not random. It is socially patterned, and legitimised targets shift with history. In Britain, for example, the predominant scapegoat is often described as shifting across the twentieth century.

Jewish communities were the target in the 1930s–40s, West Indian migrants in the 1950s–60s, and South Asian communities later still. The underlying psychology never changed.

Economic Threat: The Lynching Evidence

The clearest historical test of scapegoating comes from economic data.

Aim: To test whether economic hardship — a source of frustration too diffuse to blame directly — predicts scapegoating of a vulnerable minority.

Method: Hovland and Sears (1940) compared the annual number of lynchings of Black people in the southern United States against economic indicators for the cotton economy. The comparison spanned nearly fifty years, from 1882 to 1930.

Results: They found a substantial negative correlation. In years when cotton prices and farm values fell, lynchings rose, and vice versa, across the whole span of the data.

Conclusion: The authors read this as large-scale scapegoating: economic frustration displaced as violence onto a low-power, socially legitimised target. The design has real limits, though — it is archival, correlational, and based on aggregate rather than individual data.

Those limits prompted a reanalysis. Hepworth and West (1988) reran the same data using modern time-series regression, correcting for temporal trends the original study had not controlled for.

A significant negative relationship between economic decline and lynchings remained, but it was considerably weaker than the raw historical correlation had implied. The pattern was genuine, not an artefact — but its size had been exaggerated.

Historical Examples of Scapegoating

Sociologists have interpreted many historical examples of scapegoating through the lens of Durkheim. These range from the Spanish Inquisition and the Puritan-Indian wars of 1636 to the burning of women as alleged witches and the rise of fascism after the Great Depression.

One case looms largest. Perhaps the most blatant and tragic example in modern history is the Holocaust. Adolf Hitler notoriously scapegoated Jews for Germany’s suffering after World War I.

He did this by depicting Jewish people as more commercially successful than the average German citizen. This fed extreme nationalism. Hitler conjured resentment and hatred toward the group, triggering the genocide of millions of people in the name of “improving” Germany.

Scapegoating has repeatedly been used to justify the mass murder of other groups too. In his book Wayward Puritans, Kai T. Erikson (1966) showed that the Puritans of New England began persecuting Native Americans as a response to their own settlements’ disorganization.

The persecution lasted centuries. It contributed to the near-eradication of Native American populations in the United States.

Critical Evaluation of Scapegoat Theory

Scapegoat theory belongs to the individual-level, psychodynamic family of explanations for prejudice, alongside the authoritarian personality tradition. Its record is mixed. Some parts are well supported; others need real qualification.

Strengths and Limitations

• Explains Misdirected Hostility: Scapegoating accounts for the defining oddity of prejudice: aggression aimed at groups that did not cause the frustration. It also predicts that hostility rises during collective threat, a prediction now backed by modern experiments as well as history.
• A Vindicated Mechanism, a Qualified Size: Displacement itself is well evidenced — a large meta-analysis confirms it as a reliable effect. But the size of the threat-to-prejudice link is more modest than the classic historical correlations first suggested.
• Cannot Explain Target Selection: The mechanism explains that a scapegoat will be found, not which group gets chosen. Direction is set by social legitimation, norms, and which group membership feels salient at the time.
• Reductionism: Locating an intergroup phenomenon in individual frustration and Freudian displacement risks ignoring its collective, structural character. It also struggles to explain why prejudice is often uniform across a whole population.
• Weak Classic Evidence: The strongest classic support is archival and correlational, and Freudian concepts like displacement and catharsis are difficult to test directly. The empirical case now rests more on modern experimental and meta-analytic evidence.

Contemporary Research

Modern research has moved the study of scapegoating from historical correlation toward controlled, causal tests.

Is Displaced Aggression a Reliable Effect?

Miller and Bugelski (1948) provided the first experimental hint. Men whose evening out was cancelled rated two ethnic minority groups less favourably afterward, even though the groups had no part in the disappointment.

Marcus-Newhall, Pedersen, Carlson, and Miller (2000) tested whether this effect held at scale. The verdict was clear. Their meta-analysis pooled many controlled experiments and found displaced aggression to be a reliable, statistically significant effect.

It was strongest when the innocent target had given even a minor provocation of their own — a pattern the authors called triggered displaced aggression.

Berkowitz (1989) supplied the mechanism. He proposed that frustration breeds aggression only because it creates negative affect, or unpleasant feeling. Because of this, any aversive event — not only a blocked goal — can prime aggression through the same route.

Scapegoating of Minorities Today

The clearest modern evidence comes from a 2023 lab-in-the-field experiment.

Aim: To test experimentally whether majority-group members shift punishment onto innocent minority bystanders after an in-group member is harmed, and whether this depends on the bystander’s ethnicity.

Method: Bauer et al. (2023) ran incentivised lab-in-the-field experiments in Slovakia using a new task, the Punishing the Scapegoat Game. The design was simple. A wrongdoer harmed a participant’s in-group member; the participant could then pay to punish an unrelated bystander — majority-group or Roma — against a no-harm control.

Results: With no harm, participants treated majority and Roma bystanders alike. The gap was stark. Once an in-group member was harmed, punishment passed on to an innocent Roma bystander more than doubled compared with an equally innocent majority-group bystander.

Conclusion: Injustice to one’s own group can turn individual tension into intergroup conflict, pulling in an uninvolved minority. The design is strong. It combines randomisation, incentives, a no-harm control, and a real marginalised group. Its main limits are a single national context and a money-based punishment measure.

Comparison with Rival Theories of Prejudice

Scapegoat theory is one of several explanations of prejudice. Comparing it with its closest rivals shows where it is strong, and where it needs help from other accounts.

• Realistic Conflict Theory: Sherif (1966) located the cause of hostility in real competition between groups for scarce resources, not in an individual’s displaced frustration.
• The Authoritarian Personality: Adorno et al. (1950) shared scapegoat theory’s Freudian displacement logic, but treated hostility as a fixed personality trait rather than a one-off response to frustration.
• Social Identity Theory: Tajfel and Turner (1979) showed that mere group categorisation, with no frustration or competition at all, is enough to produce ingroup favouritism.

Realistic Conflict Theory

Where scapegoat theory locates the cause of hostility in the frustrated individual, realistic conflict theory (Sherif, 1966) locates it in the relationship between groups.

Sherif argued that competition for the same scarce goal is, on its own, enough to cause hostility. No prior frustration or personality factor is required.

The two accounts are not strictly incompatible, though. A group in real competition may also be displacing frustration onto its rival at the same time.

And that same competitive situation can itself be a source of the frustration scapegoat theory says gets displaced.

Realistic conflict theory corrects a genuine limitation of scapegoating. It explains why hostility crystallises along group lines and tracks a group’s changing competitive position — something a purely individual-level mechanism struggles to do alone.

The Authoritarian Personality

This is scapegoat theory’s closest sibling, since both share the same Freudian displacement machinery. But the two diverge in an instructive way.

Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, and Sanford (1950) treated the authoritarian personality as a fixed disposition, sedimented in a harsh childhood and expressed consistently regardless of any immediate provocation. Scapegoat theory, by contrast, treats displaced hostility as a situational response, triggered afresh whenever someone is frustrated by a powerful or diffuse cause.

This has practical stakes. Scapegoat theory predicts that hostility should rise and fall with the frustrations a population is currently experiencing, as in the lynching data above. The authoritarian-personality account instead predicts that highly authoritarian people show more prejudice largely independent of current events. Neither prediction rules out the other.

Social Identity Theory

A third theory complicates both.

This is the sharpest contrast of the three. Social identity theory (Tajfel & Turner, 1979) holds that mere categorisation into groups is enough to produce ingroup favouritism and outgroup discrimination. No frustration, competition, or personal stake is required, as the minimal-group experiments showed.

This directly challenges scapegoat theory’s assumption that prior frustration is doing the causal work. That is a real problem for the theory. On a social-identity reading, a scapegoat need not come from displaced aggression at all. It can come simply from dividing the social world into “us” and “them.”

The two accounts are best read as complementary. Kessler and Mummendey (2001) found that grievances escalate into intergroup hostility specifically when group categorisation is made salient.

This shows categorisation and frustration working together: categorisation decides whether a frustration is expressed at the group level; frustration supplies the motivational charge once it is.

References

Adorno, T. W., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D. J., & Sanford, R. N. (1950). The Authoritarian Personality. Harper & Row.

Allport, G. W. (1954). The Nature of Human Prejudice. Cambridge, MA: Addison-Wesley.

Bauer, M., Cahlíková, J., Chytilová, J., Roland, G., & Želinský, T. (2023). Shifting punishment onto minorities: Experimental evidence of scapegoating. The Economic Journal, 133(652), 1626–1640.

Berkowitz, L. (1989). Frustration–aggression hypothesis: Examination and reformulation. Psychological Bulletin, 106(1), 59–73.

Dollard, J., Doob, L. W., Miller, N. E., Mowrer, O. H., & Sears, R. R. (1939). Frustration and Aggression. Yale University Press.

Erikson, K. T. (1966). Wayward Puritans: A Study in the Sociology of Deviance.

Fauconnet, P. (1920). La responsabilité.

Hepworth, J. T., & West, S. G. (1988). Lynchings and the economy: A time-series reanalysis of Hovland and Sears (1940). Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 55(2), 239–247.

Hovland, C. I., & Sears, R. R. (1940). Minor studies of aggression: VI. Correlation of lynchings with economic indices. The Journal of Psychology, 9(2), 301–310.

Kessler, T., & Mummendey, A. (2001). Is there any scapegoat around? Determinants of intergroup conflicts at different categorization levels. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81(6), 1090.

Hammer, E. (2007). Scapegoat Theory. In Baumeister, R. F. (Ed.). Encyclopedia of social psychology (Vol. 1). Sage.

Marcus-Newhall, A., Pedersen, W. C., Carlson, M., & Miller, N. (2000). Displaced aggression is alive and well: A meta-analytic review. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78(4), 670–689.

Mestrovic, S. (2007). Scapegoating. The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology, 1-2.

Mestrovic, S. (2015). G. 21. Yüzyılda Durkheim, çev. S. Güldal, S. Güldal, Ġstanbul: Matbu Kitap.

Sherif, M. (1966). Group Conflict and Co-operation: Their Social Psychology. Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Tajfel, H., & Turner, J. C. (1979). An integrative theory of intergroup conflict. In W. G. Austin & S. Worchel (Eds.), The Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations (pp. 33–47). Brooks/Cole.