Just-world phenomenon
Encyclopedia
The just world hypothesis describes a cognitive bias
in which people believe that the world they live in is one in which actions have appropriate and predictable consequences. This phenomenon 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. Since that time, research has continued, examining the predictive capacity of the hypothesis in various situations and across cultures, and clarifying and expanding the theoretical understandings of just world beliefs.
research.
Melvin 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. Though he knew them to be kindhearted, educated people, they blamed patients for their own suffering. He also describes his surprise at hearing his students derogate the poor, seemingly oblivious to the structural forces
that contribute to poverty. In a study he was doing on rewards, he observed that when two men who were rewarded for a task were evaluated by observers, evaluations were always more positive for the one who had been accidentally rewarded. Existing social psychological theories, including cognitive dissonance
, could not fully explain these phenomena. The desire to understand the processes that caused these observed phenomena led Lerner to conduct his first experiments on what is now called the just world hypothesis.
, 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 of the confederate. However, as the suffering continued and observers remained unable to intervene, the observers began to derogate the victim. Derogation was greater when the observed suffering from shock treatments was greater. However, under conditions in which subjects were told that 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.
Lerner hypothesized that the belief in a just world is crucially important for people to maintain for their own well-being. However, people are confronted daily with evidence that the world is not just: people suffer without apparent cause. Lerner explained that people employ tactics to eliminate threats to the belief in a just world. These tactics can be rational
or irrational. Rational tactics include accepting the reality of injustice, trying to prevent injustice or provide restitution, and accepting one's own limitations. Non-rational strategies include denial
or withdrawal, and reinterpretation of the event.
There are a few modes of reinterpretation that could make an event to 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 others, one major way to rearrange the cognition of an event is to interpret the victim of suffering as deserving of that suffering. Specifically, observers can blame victims for their suffering on the basis of their behaviors and/or their characteristics. This would result in observers both derogating victims and blaming victims for their own suffering. Much psychological research on the belief in a just world has focused on this phenomenon of victim blaming
and derogation.
An additional effect of this thinking is that people feel less personally vulnerable
, because they have not done anything to deserve 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 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.
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 herself to be shocked without justification. 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.
. Observers may feel responsible
, or guilty, for a victim's suffering if they themsleves 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.
, illnesses, and poverty. Generally, researchers have found that observers of the suffering of innocent victims tend to both derogate victims and blame victims for their suffering. Thus, observers maintain their belief in a just world by changing their cognitions about the character of victims.
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 utilized these measurement scales
.
and other violence
. In a seminal experiment on rape and belief in a just world by Ronnie Janoff-Bulman 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 happy ending (a marriage proposal) 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. This finding has been replicated repeatedly.
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.
. 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.
victims. Many studies have looked at derogation of AIDS victims specifically. Higher beliefs in a just world have been found to be related to greater derogation of AIDS
victims.
through the lens of the just world hypothesis. High belief in a just world is associated with blaming the poor, and low belief in a just world is associated with identifying external causes of poverty including world economic systems, war
, and exploitation
.
.
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 just world hypothesis has become widely accepted as a psychological phenomenon.
and ultimate justice, hope for justice, and belief in one's ability to reduce injustices. 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 health.
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 Black 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 have provided evidence that the world is not just and predictable.
of individuals. Belief in a just world is associated with greater life satisfaction and well-being and less depressive affect. Researchers are actively exploring reasons that belief in a just world might have these relationships 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 .
Correlational studies also showed that beliefs in a just world are correlated with internal locus of control
. Strong beliefs in a just world are associated with greater acceptance of and less satisfaction with negative outcomes in life. This may be one pathway through which belief in a just world affects mental health. Others have suggested that this relationship only holds for beliefs in a just world that apply to the self. Beliefs in a just world that apply to others are related instead to the victim blaming and derogation observed in other studies.
Cognitive bias
A cognitive bias is a pattern of deviation in judgment that occurs in particular situations. Implicit in the concept of a "pattern of deviation" is a standard of comparison; this may be the judgment of people outside those particular situations, or may be a set of independently verifiable...
in which people believe that the world they live in is one in which actions have appropriate and predictable consequences. This phenomenon has been widely studied by social psychologists since Melvin J. Lerner
Melvin J. Lerner
Melvin J. Lerner, Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Waterloo between 1970 and 1994 and now a visiting scholar at Florida Atlantic University, has been called "a pioneer in the psychological study of justice"...
conducted seminal work on the belief in a just world in the early 1960s. Since that time, research has continued, 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
The phenomenon of belief in a just world has been observed and considered by many philosophers and social theorists. Psychologist Melvin Lerner's work made the just world hypothesis a focus of social psychologicalSocial psychology
Social psychology is the scientific study of how people's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others. By this definition, scientific refers to the empirical method of investigation. The terms thoughts, feelings, and behaviors include all...
research.
Melvin Lerner
Melvin Lerner was prompted to study justice
Justice
Justice is a concept of moral rightness based on ethics, rationality, law, natural law, religion, or equity, along with the punishment of the breach of said ethics; justice is the act of being just and/or fair.-Concept of 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
Stanley Milgram
Stanley Milgram was an American social psychologist most notable for his controversial study known as the Milgram Experiment. The study was conducted in the 1960s during Milgram's professorship at Yale...
'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
Suffering
Suffering, or pain in a broad sense, is an individual's basic affective experience of unpleasantness and aversion associated with harm or threat of harm. Suffering may be qualified as physical or mental. It may come in all degrees of intensity, from mild to intolerable. Factors of duration and...
.
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. Though he knew them to be kindhearted, educated people, they blamed patients for their own suffering. He also describes his surprise at hearing his students derogate the poor, seemingly oblivious to the structural forces
Structural violence
Structural violence is a term first used in the 1960s commonly ascribed to Johan Galtung. It refers to a form of violence where some social structure or social institution harms people by preventing them from meeting their basic needs. Institutionalized elitism, ethnocentrism, classism, racism,...
that contribute to poverty. In a study he was doing on rewards, he observed that when two men who were rewarded for a task were evaluated by observers, evaluations were always more positive for the one who had been accidentally rewarded. Existing social psychological theories, including cognitive dissonance
Cognitive dissonance
Cognitive dissonance is a discomfort caused by holding conflicting ideas simultaneously. The theory of cognitive dissonance proposes that people have a motivational drive to reduce dissonance. They do this by changing their attitudes, beliefs, and actions. Dissonance is also reduced by justifying,...
, could not fully explain these phenomena. The desire to understand the processes that caused these observed 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 KansasUniversity of Kansas
The University of Kansas is a public research university and the largest university in the state of Kansas. KU campuses are located in Lawrence, Wichita, Overland Park, and Kansas City, Kansas with the main campus being located in Lawrence on Mount Oread, the highest point in Lawrence. The...
, 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 of the confederate. However, as the suffering continued and observers remained unable to intervene, the observers began to derogate the victim. Derogation was greater when the observed suffering from shock treatments was greater. However, under conditions in which subjects were told that 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
In order to explain the findings of these studies, Lerner theorized the prevalence of the 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 the norms and ideologies of a society. Lerner presents the belief in a just world as functional: it maintains the idea that one can impact 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. However, people are confronted daily with evidence that the world is not just: people suffer without apparent cause. Lerner explained that people employ tactics to eliminate threats to the belief in a just world. These tactics can be rational
Rationality
In philosophy, rationality is the exercise of reason. It is the manner in which people derive conclusions when considering things deliberately. It also refers to the conformity of one's beliefs with one's reasons for belief, or with one's actions with one's reasons for action...
or irrational. Rational tactics include accepting the reality of injustice, trying to prevent injustice or provide restitution, and accepting one's own limitations. Non-rational strategies include denial
Denial
Denial is a defense mechanism postulated by Sigmund Freud, in which a person is faced with a fact that is too uncomfortable to accept and rejects it instead, insisting that it is not true despite what may be overwhelming evidence.The subject may use:* simple denial: deny the reality of the...
or withdrawal, and reinterpretation of the event.
There are a few modes of reinterpretation that could make an event to 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 others, one major way to rearrange the cognition of an event is to interpret the victim of suffering as deserving of that suffering. Specifically, observers can blame victims for their suffering on the basis of their behaviors and/or their characteristics. This would result in observers both derogating victims and blaming victims for their own suffering. Much psychological research on the belief in a just world has focused on this phenomenon of victim blaming
Victim blaming
Victim blaming occurs when the victim of a crime, an accident, or any type of abusive maltreatment are held entirely or partially responsible for the transgressions committed against them. Blaming the victim has traditionally emerged especially in racist and sexist forms...
and derogation.
An additional effect of this thinking is that people feel less personally vulnerable
Vulnerability
Vulnerability refer to the susceptibility of a person, group, society, sex or system to physical or emotional injury or attack. The term can also refer to a person who lets their guard down, leaving themselves open to censure or criticism...
, because they have not done anything to deserve negative outcomes. This is related to the self-serving bias
Self-serving bias
A self-serving bias occurs when people attribute their successes to internal or personal factors but attribute their failures to situational factors beyond their control. The self-serving bias can be seen in the common human tendency to take credit for success but to deny responsibility for failure...
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 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.
Veridical judgment
Others have suggested alternative explanations for the derogationDerogation
Derogation is the partial revocation of a law, as opposed to abrogation or the total abolition of a law. The term is used in both civil law and common law. It is sometimes used, loosely, to mean abrogation, as in the legal maxim: Lex posterior derogat priori, i.e...
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 herself to be shocked without justification. 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 is that observers derogate victims in order to reduce their own feelings of guiltGuilt
Guilt is the state of being responsible for the commission of an offense. It is also a cognitive or an emotional experience that occurs when a person realizes or believes—accurately or not—that he or she has violated a moral standard, and bears significant responsibility for that...
. Observers may feel responsible
Moral responsibility
Moral responsibility usually refers to the idea that a person has moral obligations in certain situations. Disobeying moral obligations, then, becomes grounds for justified punishment. Deciding what justifies punishment, if anything, is a principle concern of ethics.People who have moral...
, or guilty, for a victim's suffering if they themsleves 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.
Additional evidence
Following 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 violenceDomestic violence
Domestic violence, also known as domestic abuse, spousal abuse, battering, family violence, and intimate partner violence , is broadly defined as a pattern of abusive behaviors by one or both partners in an intimate relationship such as marriage, dating, family, or cohabitation...
, illnesses, and poverty. Generally, researchers have found that observers of the suffering of innocent victims tend to both derogate victims and blame victims for their suffering. Thus, observers maintain their belief in a just world by changing their cognitions about the character of victims.
In the early 1970s, social psychologists Zick Rubin
Zick Rubin
Isaac Michael "Zick" Rubin is an American social psychologist, lawyer, and author. He is "widely credited as the author of the first empirical measurement of love," for his work distinguishing feelings of like from feelings of love via Rubin's Scales of Liking and Loving...
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 utilized these measurement scales
Psychometrics
Psychometrics is the field of study concerned with the theory and technique of psychological measurement, which includes the measurement of knowledge, abilities, attitudes, personality traits, and educational measurement...
.
Violence
Researchers have looked at how observers react to victims of rapeRape
Rape is a type of sexual assault usually involving sexual intercourse, which is initiated by one or more persons against another person without that person's consent. The act may be carried out by physical force, coercion, abuse of authority or with a person who is incapable of valid consent. The...
and other violence
Violence
Violence is the use of physical force to apply a state to others contrary to their wishes. violence, while often a stand-alone issue, is often the culmination of other kinds of conflict, e.g...
. In a seminal experiment on rape and belief in a just world by Ronnie Janoff-Bulman 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 happy ending (a marriage proposal) 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. This finding has been replicated repeatedly.
Other researchers have found a similar phenomenon for judgments of battered partners
Domestic violence
Domestic violence, also known as domestic abuse, spousal abuse, battering, family violence, and intimate partner violence , is broadly defined as a pattern of abusive behaviors by one or both partners in an intimate relationship such as marriage, dating, family, or cohabitation...
. 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 help understand bullying. Given other research on beliefs in a just world, it would be expected that observers would derogate and blame victims of bullying. However, the opposite has been found: individuals high in just world belief have stronger anti-bullying attitudesAttitude (psychology)
An attitude is a hypothetical construct that represents an individual's degree of like or dislike for something. Attitudes are generally positive or negative views of a person, place, thing, or event— this is often referred to as the attitude object...
. 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, relative to healthy persons, on a measure of a person's attractiveness. Victim derogation increased with increasing severity of illness, except in the case of cancerCancer
Cancer , known medically as a malignant neoplasm, is a large group of different diseases, all involving unregulated cell growth. In cancer, cells divide and grow uncontrollably, forming malignant tumors, and invade nearby parts of the body. The cancer may also spread to more distant parts of the...
victims. Many studies have looked at derogation of AIDS victims specifically. Higher beliefs in a just world have been found to be related to greater derogation of AIDS
AIDS
Acquired immune deficiency syndrome or acquired immunodeficiency syndrome is a disease of the human immune system caused by the human immunodeficiency virus...
victims.
Poverty
More recently, researchers have explored how people react to povertyPoverty
Poverty is the lack of a certain amount of material possessions or money. Absolute poverty or destitution is inability to afford basic human needs, which commonly includes clean and fresh water, nutrition, health care, education, clothing and shelter. About 1.7 billion people are estimated to live...
through the lens of the just world hypothesis. High belief in a just world is associated with blaming the poor, and low belief in a just world is associated with identifying external causes of poverty including world economic systems, war
War
War is a state of organized, armed, and often prolonged conflict carried on between states, nations, or other parties typified by extreme aggression, social disruption, and usually high mortality. War should be understood as an actual, intentional and widespread armed conflict between political...
, and exploitation
Exploitation
This article discusses the term exploitation in the meaning of using something in an unjust or cruel manner.- As unjust benefit :In political economy, economics, and sociology, exploitation involves a persistent social relationship in which certain persons are being mistreated or unfairly used for...
.
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 researcher Ronnie Janoff-Bulman found that rape victims often engage in blaming their own behaviors, but not their own characteristics, for their victimization. It was hypothesized that this may be because blaming one's own behaviors makes an event more controllableLocus of control
Locus of control is a theory in personality psychology referring to the extent to which individuals believe that they can control events that affect them. Understanding of the concept was developed by Julian B...
.
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 just world hypothesis has become widely accepted as a psychological phenomenon.
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 justiceJustice
Justice is a concept of moral rightness based on ethics, rationality, law, natural law, religion, or equity, along with the punishment of the breach of said ethics; justice is the act of being just and/or fair.-Concept of justice:...
and ultimate justice, hope for justice, and belief in one's ability to reduce injustices. 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 health.
Correlates
Researchers have used measures of beliefBelief
Belief is the psychological state in which an individual holds a proposition or premise to be true.-Belief, knowledge and epistemology:The terms belief and knowledge are used differently in philosophy....
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
Authoritarianism
Authoritarianism is a form of social organization characterized by submission to authority. It is usually opposed to individualism and democracy...
and the protestant work ethic
Protestant work ethic
The Protestant work ethic is a concept in sociology, economics and history, attributable to the work of Max Weber...
. Studies have also found belief in a just world to be correlated with aspects of religiousness.
Studies of demographic differences, including gender
Gender
Gender is a range of characteristics used to distinguish between males and females, particularly in the cases of men and women and the masculine and feminine attributes assigned to them. Depending on the context, the discriminating characteristics vary from sex to social role to gender identity...
and racial
Race
Race is classification of humans into large and distinct populations or groups by factors such as heritable phenotypic characteristics or geographic ancestry, but also often influenced by and correlated with traits such as appearance, culture, ethnicity, and socio-economic status...
differences, have not shown systematic differences, but do suggest racial differences, with Black 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 have provided evidence that the world is not just and predictable.
Positive health effects
Though much of the initial work on belief in a just world focused on the negative social effects of this belief, other research on belief in a just world suggests that belief in a just world is good, and even necessary, for the mental healthMental health
Mental health describes either a level of cognitive or emotional well-being or an absence of a mental disorder. From perspectives of the discipline of positive psychology or holism mental health may include an individual's ability to enjoy life and procure a balance between life activities and...
of individuals. Belief in a just world is associated with greater life satisfaction and well-being and less depressive affect. Researchers are actively exploring reasons that belief in a just world might have these relationships to mental health; it has been suggested that such beliefs could be a personal resource or coping strategy
Coping (psychology)
Coping has been defined in psychological terms by Susan Folkman and Richard Lazarus as "constantly changing cognitive and behavioral efforts to manage specific external and/or internal demands that are appraised as taxing" or "exceeding the resources of the person".Coping is thus expending...
that buffers stress
Stress (psychological)
Stress The word stress is used in many different contexts. However, psychological stress is not as vague and all-encompassing as most people believe it to be...
associated with daily life and with traumatic events
Psychological trauma
Psychological trauma is a type of damage to the psyche that occurs as a result of a traumatic event...
. This hypothesis suggests that belief in a just world can be understood as a positive illusion .
Correlational studies also showed that beliefs in a just world are correlated with internal locus of control
Locus of control
Locus of control is a theory in personality psychology referring to the extent to which individuals believe that they can control events that affect them. Understanding of the concept was developed by Julian B...
. Strong beliefs in a just world are associated with greater acceptance of and less satisfaction with negative outcomes in life. This may be one pathway through which belief in a just world affects mental health. Others have suggested that this relationship only holds for beliefs in a just world that apply to the self. Beliefs in a just world that apply to others are related instead to the victim blaming and derogation observed in other studies.
International research
Over forty 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 a German researcher entitled Responses to Victimizations and Belief in a Just world.See also
- Victim blamingVictim blamingVictim blaming occurs when the victim of a crime, an accident, or any type of abusive maltreatment are held entirely or partially responsible for the transgressions committed against them. Blaming the victim has traditionally emerged especially in racist and sexist forms...
- Cognitive dissonanceCognitive dissonanceCognitive dissonance is a discomfort caused by holding conflicting ideas simultaneously. The theory of cognitive dissonance proposes that people have a motivational drive to reduce dissonance. They do this by changing their attitudes, beliefs, and actions. Dissonance is also reduced by justifying,...
- DenialDenialDenial is a defense mechanism postulated by Sigmund Freud, in which a person is faced with a fact that is too uncomfortable to accept and rejects it instead, insisting that it is not true despite what may be overwhelming evidence.The subject may use:* simple denial: deny the reality of the...
- Fundamental attribution errorFundamental attribution errorIn social psychology, the fundamental attribution error describes the tendency to over-value dispositional or personality-based explanations for the observed behaviors of others while under-valuing situational explanations for those behaviors...
- Hindsight biasHindsight biasHindsight bias, or alternatively the knew-it-all-along effect and creeping determinism, is the inclination to see events that have already occurred as being more predictable than they were before they took place. It is a multifaceted phenomenon that can affect different stages of designs,...
- Best of all possible worldsBest of all possible worldsThe phrase "the best of all possible worlds" was coined by the German polymath Gottfried Leibniz in his 1710 work Essais de Théodicée sur la bonté de Dieu, la liberté de l'homme et l'origine du mal...
- Mean world syndromeMean World Syndrome"Mean world syndrome" is a term coined by George Gerbner to describe a phenomenon whereby violence-related content of mass media makes viewers believe that the world is more dangerous than it actually is. Mean world syndrome is one of the main conclusions of cultivation theory...
- System justificationSystem justificationSystem justification theory is a scientific theory within social psychology that proposes people have a motivation to defend and bolster the status quo, that is, to see it as good, legitimate, and desirable....
- TheodicyTheodicyTheodicy is a theological and philosophical study which attempts to prove God's intrinsic or foundational nature of omnibenevolence , omniscience , and omnipotence . Theodicy is usually concerned with the God of the Abrahamic religions Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, due to the relevant...