The just-world hypothesis or just-world fallacy is the cognitive bias (or assumption) that a person's actions are inherently inclined to bring morally fair and fitting consequences to that person, to the end of all noble actions being eventually rewarded and all evil actions eventually punished. In other words, the just-world hypothesis is the tendency to attribute consequences to—or expect consequences as the result of—a universal force that restores moral balance. This belief generally implies the existence of cosmic justice, destiny, divine providence, desert, stability, or order, and has high potential to result in fallacy, especially when used to rationalize people's misfortune on the grounds that they "deserve" it.
The hypothesis popularly appears in the English language in various figures of speech that imply guaranteed negative reprisal, such as: "you got what was coming to you", "what goes around comes around", "chickens come home to roost", "everything happens for a reason", and "you reap what you sow". This hypothesis has been widely studied by social psychologists since Melvin J. Lerner conducted seminal work on the belief in a just world in the early 1960s.
Research has continued since then, examining the predictive capacity of
the hypothesis in various situations and across cultures, and
clarifying and expanding the theoretical understandings of just-world
beliefs.
Emergence
Many
philosophers and social theorists have observed and considered the
phenomenon of belief in a just world, going back to at least as early as
the Pyrrhonist philosopher Sextus Empiricus writing around 180 CE who argued against this belief. Lerner's work made the just-world hypothesis a focus of research in the field of social psychology.
Melvin Lerner
Lerner was prompted to study justice
beliefs and the just-world hypothesis in the context of social
psychological inquiry into negative social and societal interactions. Lerner saw his work as extending Stanley Milgram's work on obedience.
He sought to answer the questions of how regimes that cause cruelty and
suffering maintain popular support, and how people come to accept social norms and laws that produce misery and suffering.
Lerner's inquiry was influenced by repeatedly witnessing the tendency of observers to blame victims
for their suffering. During his clinical training as a psychologist, he
observed treatment of mentally ill persons by the health care
practitioners with whom he worked. Although he knew them to be
kindhearted, educated people, they often blamed patients for the
patients' own suffering. Lerner also describes his surprise at hearing his students derogate (disparage, belittle) the poor, seemingly oblivious to the structural forces that contribute to poverty.
In a study on rewards, he observed that when one of two men was chosen
at random to receive a reward for a task, that caused him to be more
favorably evaluated by observers, even when the observers had been
informed that the recipient of the reward was chosen at random. Existing social psychological theories, including cognitive dissonance, could not fully explain these phenomena.
The desire to understand the processes that caused these phenomena led
Lerner to conduct his first experiments on what is now called the
just-world hypothesis.
Early evidence
In 1966, Lerner and his colleagues began a series of experiments that used shock paradigms to investigate observer responses to victimization. In the first of these experiments conducted at the University of Kansas,
72 female subjects were made to watch a confederate receiving
electrical shocks under a variety of conditions. Initially, subjects
were upset by observing the apparent suffering. But as the suffering
continued and observers remained unable to intervene, the observers
began to derogate the victim. Derogation was greater when the observed
suffering was greater. But when subjects were told the victim would
receive compensation for her suffering, subjects did not derogate the
victim. Lerner and colleagues replicated these findings in subsequent studies, as did other researchers.
Theory
To
explain these studies' findings, Lerner theorized that there was a
prevalent belief in a just world. A just world is one in which actions
and conditions have predictable, appropriate consequences. These actions
and conditions are typically individuals' behaviors or attributes. The
specific conditions that correspond to certain consequences are socially
determined by a society's norms and ideologies. Lerner presents the
belief in a just world as functional: it maintains the idea that one can
influence the world in a predictable way. Belief in a just world
functions as a sort of "contract" with the world regarding the
consequences of behavior. This allows people to plan for the future and
engage in effective, goal-driven behavior. Lerner summarized his
findings and his theoretical work in his 1980 monograph The Belief in a Just World: A Fundamental Delusion.
Lerner hypothesized that the belief in a just world is crucially
important for people to maintain for their own well-being. But people
are confronted daily with evidence that the world is not just: people
suffer without apparent cause. Lerner explained that people use
strategies to eliminate threats to their belief in a just world. These
strategies can be rational
or irrational. Rational strategies include accepting the reality of
injustice, trying to prevent injustice or provide restitution, and
accepting one's own limitations. Non-rational strategies include denial, withdrawal, and reinterpretation of the event.
There are a few modes of reinterpretation that could make an
event fit the belief in a just world. One can reinterpret the outcome,
the cause, and/or the character of the victim. In the case of observing
the injustice of the suffering of innocent people, one major way to
rearrange the cognition of an event is to interpret the victim of
suffering as deserving. Specifically, observers can blame victims for their suffering on the basis of their behaviors and/or their characteristics. Much psychological research on the belief in a just world has focused on these negative social phenomena of victim blaming and victim derogation in different contexts.
An additional effect of this thinking is that individuals experience less personal vulnerability because they do not believe they have done anything to deserve or cause negative outcomes. This is related to the self-serving bias observed by social psychologists.
Many researchers have interpreted just-world beliefs as an example of causal attribution.
In victim blaming, the causes of victimization are attributed to an
individual rather than to a situation. Thus, the consequences of belief
in a just world may be related to or explained in terms of particular
patterns of causal attribution.
Alternatives
Veridical judgment
Others have suggested alternative explanations for the derogation of
victims. One suggestion is that derogation effects are based on accurate
judgments of a victim's character. In particular, in relation to
Lerner's first studies, some have hypothesized that it would be logical
for observers to derogate an individual who would allow himself to be
shocked without reason.
A subsequent study by Lerner challenged this alternative hypothesis by
showing that individuals are only derogated when they actually suffer;
individuals who agreed to undergo suffering but did not were viewed
positively.
Guilt reduction
Another
alternative explanation offered for the derogation of victims early in
the development of the just-world hypothesis was that observers derogate
victims to reduce their own feelings of guilt. Observers may feel responsible,
or guilty, for a victim's suffering if they themselves are involved in
the situation or experiment. In order to reduce the guilt, they may
devalue the victim.
Lerner and colleagues claim that there has not been adequate evidence
to support this interpretation. They conducted one study that found
derogation of victims occurred even by observers who were not implicated
in the process of the experiment and thus had no reason to feel guilty.
Discomfort reduction
Alternatively,
victim derogation and other strategies may only be ways to alleviate
discomfort after viewing suffering. This would mean that the primary
motivation is not to restore a belief in a just world, but to reduce
discomfort caused by empathizing.
Studies have shown that victim derogation does not suppress subsequent
helping activity and that empathizing with the victim plays a large
role when assigning blame. According to Ervin Staub,
devaluing the victim should lead to lesser compensation if restoring
belief in a just world was the primary motive; instead, there is
virtually no difference in compensation amounts whether the compensation
precedes or follows devaluation. Psychopathy
has been linked to the lack of just-world maintaining strategies,
possibly due to dampened emotional reactions and lack of empathy.
Additional evidence
After
Lerner's first studies, other researchers replicated these findings in
other settings in which individuals are victimized. This work, which
began in the 1970s and continues today, has investigated how observers
react to victims of random calamities like traffic accidents, as well as
rape and domestic violence, illnesses, and poverty.
Generally, researchers have found that observers of the suffering of
innocent victims tend to both derogate and blame victims for their
suffering. Observers thus maintain their belief in a just world by
changing their cognitions about the victims' character.
In the early 1970s, social psychologists Zick Rubin and Letitia Anne Peplau developed a measure of belief in a just world. This measure and its revised form published in 1975 allowed for the study of individual differences in just-world beliefs. Much of the subsequent research on the just-world hypothesis used these measurement scales.
Violence
Researchers have looked at how observers react to victims of rape and other violence.
In a formative experiment on rape and belief in a just world by Linda
Carli and colleagues, researchers gave two groups of subjects a
narrative about interactions between a man and a woman. The description
of the interaction was the same until the end; one group received a
narrative that had a neutral ending and the other group received a
narrative that ended with the man raping the woman. Subjects judged the
rape ending as inevitable and blamed the woman in the narrative for the
rape on the basis of her behavior, but not her characteristics. These findings have been replicated repeatedly, including using a rape ending and a 'happy ending' (a marriage proposal).
Other researchers have found a similar phenomenon for judgments of battered partners.
One study found that observers' labels of blame of female victims of
relationship violence increase with the intimacy of the relationship.
Observers blamed the perpetrator only in the most significant case of
violence, in which a male struck an acquaintance.
Bullying
Researchers have employed the just-world hypothesis to understand bullying.
Given other research on beliefs in a just world, it would be expected
that observers would derogate and blame bullying victims, but the
opposite has been found: individuals high in just-world belief have
stronger anti-bullying attitudes. Other researchers have found that strong belief in a just world is associated with lower levels of bullying behavior.
This finding is in keeping with Lerner's understanding of belief in a
just world as functioning as a "contract" that governs behavior.
There is additional evidence that belief in a just world is protective
of the well-being of children and adolescents in the school environment, as has been shown for the general population.
Illness
Other
researchers have found that observers judge sick people as responsible
for their illnesses. One experiment showed that persons suffering from a
variety of illnesses were derogated on a measure of attractiveness more
than healthy individuals were. In comparison to healthy people, victim
derogation was found for persons presenting with indigestion, pneumonia,
and stomach cancer. Moreover, derogation was found to be higher for
those suffering from more severe illnesses, except for those presenting
with cancer. Stronger belief in a just world has also been found to correlate with greater derogation of AIDS victims.
Poverty
More recently, researchers have explored how people react to poverty
through the lens of the just-world hypothesis. Strong belief in a just
world is associated with blaming the poor, with weak belief in a just
world associated with identifying external causes of poverty including
world economic systems, war, and exploitation.
The self as victim
Some research on belief in a just world has examined how people react
when they themselves are victimized. An early paper by Dr. Ronnie
Janoff-Bulman found that rape victims often blame their own behavior,
but not their own characteristics, for their victimization. It was hypothesized that this may be because blaming one's own behavior makes an event more controllable.
These studies on victims of violence, illness, and poverty
and others like them have provided consistent support for the link
between observers' just-world beliefs and their tendency to blame
victims for their suffering. As a result, the existence of the just-world hypothesis as a psychological phenomenon has become widely accepted.
Theoretical refinement
Subsequent
work on measuring belief in a just world has focused on identifying
multiple dimensions of the belief. This work has resulted in the
development of new measures of just-world belief and additional
research. Hypothesized dimensions of just-world beliefs include belief in an unjust world, beliefs in immanent justice and ultimate justice, hope for justice, and belief in one's ability to reduce injustice.
Other work has focused on looking at the different domains in which
the belief may function; individuals may have different just-world
beliefs for the personal domain, the sociopolitical domain, the social
domain, etc.
An especially fruitful distinction is between the belief in a just
world for the self (personal) and the belief in a just world for others
(general). These distinct beliefs are differentially associated with positive mental health.
Correlates
Researchers have used measures of belief in a just world to look at correlates of high and low levels of belief in a just world.
Limited studies have examined ideological correlates of the
belief in a just world. These studies have found sociopolitical
correlates of just-world beliefs, including right-wing authoritarianism and the protestant work ethic. Studies have also found belief in a just world to be correlated with aspects of religiousness.
Studies of demographic differences, including gender and racial
differences, have not shown systematic differences, but do suggest
racial differences, with blacks and African Americans having the lowest
levels of belief in a just world.
The development of measures of just-world beliefs has also
allowed researchers to assess cross-cultural differences in just-world
beliefs. Much research conducted shows that beliefs in a just world are
evident cross-culturally. One study tested beliefs in a just world of
students in 12 countries. This study found that in countries where the
majority of inhabitants are powerless, belief in a just world tends to
be weaker than in other countries.
This supports the theory of the just-world hypothesis because the
powerless have had more personal and societal experiences that provided
evidence that the world is not just and predictable.
Belief in unjust world has been linked to increased self-handicapping,
criminality, defensive coping, anger and perceived future risk. It may
also serve as ego-protective belief for certain individuals by
justifying maladaptive behavior.
Current research
Positive mental health effects
Although
much of the initial work on belief in a just world focused on its
negative social effects, other research suggests that belief in a just
world is good, and even necessary, for mental health. Belief in a just world is associated with greater life satisfaction and well-being and less depressive affect.
Researchers are actively exploring the reasons why the belief in a just
world might have this relationship to mental health; it has been
suggested that such beliefs could be a personal resource or coping strategy that buffers stress associated with daily life and with traumatic events. This hypothesis suggests that belief in a just world can be understood as a positive illusion.
Some studies also show that beliefs in a just world are correlated with internal locus of control.
Strong belief in a just world is associated with greater acceptance of
and less dissatisfaction with negative events in one's life.
This may be one way in which belief in a just world affects mental
health. Others have suggested that this relationship holds only for
beliefs in a just world for oneself. Beliefs in a just world for others
are related instead to the negative social phenomena of victim blaming
and victim derogation observed in other studies.
International research
More
than 40 years after Lerner's seminal work on belief in a just world,
researchers continue to study the phenomenon. Work continues primarily
in the United States, Europe, Australia, and Asia. Researchers in Germany have contributed disproportionately to recent research. Their work resulted in a volume edited by Lerner and German researcher Leo Montada titled Responses to Victimizations and Belief in a Just World.
