I'd not heard of these studies/experiments, but they certainly sound both correct — and disturbing. In short, people who believe the world should be fundamentally fair and just — that virtue is rewarded and that vice is punished — will, if faced with an injustice they can't understand or correct, tend to blame the victim. After all, if someone is in a bad way, and there are no obvious (or addressable) bad guys who put them there, it must be their fault.
You can see this in cases of rape. You can see this in cases of poverty. You can see this all over the place. The desire to find a reason and for a world that makes sense leads to the conclusion that people who are suffering must have some role (either through personal flaws or in God's punishment) in how they got into that situation.
(h/t +Kee Hinckley)
I would blame the Puritans, since they are the source of most of our cultural problems, but it is nice to see that it is deeper than that.
Well, there's a serious thread in the Old Testament along these lines: toe the line and God will bless you; sin and God will smite you and yours with all sorts of misfortune. It's a trivial (though itself logically fallacious) matter to turn that around and identify misfortune as being the result of sin.
(Interestingly enough, we were discussing at a Bible Study last night (yeah, I know) a different message that runs in parts of the New Testament — that rule-following (or at least visible rule-following) is not a guarantee of virtuous reward, and that what is "fair and just" is not necessarily the way the Kingdom of Heaven behaves, e.g., the Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard, or the Parable of the Prodigal Son.)
It's ironic that, even though we recognize in our own lives that good things happen to bad people, and bad things happen to good people, we still seek the order and meaning to emotionally feel it's all about justice, esp. when it's happening to people we don't personally know.