Victim Blaming. 2012: the year when it became okay to blame victims of sexual assault

[NYC Liberal]

97. "Just-world hypothesis" explains exactly that.

The just-world hypothesis (or just-world fallacy) is the cognitive bias that human actions eventually yield morally fair and fitting consequences, so that, ultimately, noble actions are duly rewarded and evil actions are duly punished. In other words, the just-world hypothesis is the tendency to attribute consequences to, or expect consequences as the result of, an unspecified power that restores moral balance; the fallacy is that this implies (often unintentionally) the existence of such a power in terms of some cosmic force of justice, desert, stability, or order in the universe.

Also the actor–observer bias:

Actor–observer asymmetry (also actor–observer bias) explains the errors that one makes when forming attributions about behavior (Jones & Nisbett, 1971). When a person judges their own behavior, and they are the actor, they are more likely to attribute their actions to the particular situation than to a generalization about their personality. Yet when a person is attributing the behavior of another person, thus acting as the observer; they are more likely to attribute this behavior to the person’s overall disposition than as a result of situational factors. This frequent error shows the bias that people hold in their evaluations of behavior (Miller & Norman, 1975). People are more likely to see their own behavior as affected by the situation they are in, or the sequence of occurrences that have happened to them throughout their day. But, they see other people’s actions as solely a product of their overall personality, and they do not afford them the chance to explain their behavior as exclusively a result of a situational effect.

Basically people blame bad actions on the situation or some other extenuating circumstance when it's them, but when it's someone else they ascribe it to some kind of personal character flaw in the other person. Ex: You don't stop to help someone who's fallen, it's because you were late for a really important meeting or some other extenuating circumstance. You see someone else do the same, they're an asshole, they don't care about other people, etc.