The just-world hypothesis or just-world fallacy is the cognitive bias that assumes that "people get what they deserve" – that actions will have morally fair and fitting consequences for the actor. For example, the assumptions that noble actions will eventually be rewarded and evil actions will eventually be punished fall under this hypothesis. In other words, the just-world hypothesis is the tendency to attribute consequences to—or expect consequences as the result of— either a universal force that restores moral balance or a universal connection between the nature of actions and their results. This belief generally implies the existence of cosmic justice, destiny, divine providence, desert, stability, and/or order. It is often associated with a variety of fundamental fallacies, especially in regard to rationalizing suffering on the grounds that the sufferers "deserve" it.
They found that people who have a strong tendency to believe in a just world also tend to be more religious, more authoritarian, more conservative, more likely to admire political leaders and existing social institutions, and more likely to have negative attitudes toward underprivileged groups.
Why do people believe in the just-world fallacy?
The just-world theory (Lerner, 1980) assumes that people want to believe that they live in a world where good things happen to good people and bad things only to bad ones and where therefore everyone harvests what they sow (see also Furnham, 2003; Dalbert, 2009; Hafer and Sutton, 2016).Sep 25, 2017
Who believes in a just world?
Believers in a just world have been found to be more religious, more authoritarian, and more oriented toward the internal control of reinforcements than nonbelievers. They are also more likely to admire political leaders and existing social institutions, and to have negative attitudes toward underprivileged groups.
> Why do people believe in the just-world fallacy?
I'm not sure that "fallacy" is the right word, there. A fallacy is an error of reasoning; BJW is simply a belief, it's not usually derived from reasoning. In fact I suspect it's deeper than even beliefs; my guess is that people don't know they believe in a just world.
So I don't think people "believe in" a just world; rather, their behaviour, including the things they say they believe, are the manifestation of their personality. I suspect people that find the world scary and dangerous are more inclined to believe in "pie in the sky when you die". Finding the world scary and dangerous is a personality type, not a belief system.
reading that, I would imagine this also relates to people in privileged situations thinking that they have "earned" that privilege for a reason. And thus that people in underprivileged situations have earned that too.
Yikes. I can see how that can lead to social issues when a large portion of the "haves" believe in this just-world hypothesis.
Is there any data/research that quantifies this belief in different countries/cultures?
Well, the US is a fine example of your realization. People like to preach "You just need work hard and you'll be successful.". If you believe that, then on the flip side you'd have to believe, "Those poor people are poor because they're lazy.". To me that's why there's a lot of people screaming and yelling about "Handouts for the poor!".
It is more like "right makes might" -- The belief that people who act rightly will become stronger and therefore strength is a sign of moral rectitude.
Ideally, but the feedback loop is too long to have a positive effect in this world.
Plus, there are enough examples in those same scriptures of immediate feedback to reinforce the “I’m doing well now, thus I’m doing the right thing” mentality.
If you don't believe that, then it leads to nihilismm, apathy or Marxism. The idea that there is or should be a link between effort and reward is fundamental to any functioning society. It's actually people who don't believe in the just world hypothesis who end up acting anti-socially, as history makes clear.
Two types of BJW (general and personal) are investigated in this study: higher general BJW was linked to more dishonest behavior and there was no significant relationship between personal BJW and levels of dishonesty.
General BJW: refers to the belief that the world is a just place in general, where all people normally get what they deserve, are treated fairly, and will be compensated for experienced injustices.
Personal BJW: refers to the belief that oneself will be treated fairly and that one’s own life is just (Dalbert, 2009; Hafer and Sutton, 2016), which people normally endorse more strongly than the general belief (Dalbert, 1999; Hafer and Sutton, 2016). Furthermore, personal BJW can in particular be seen as an expression of social desirability (Alves and Correia, 2010) so that people deliberately give high ratings of their levels of personal BJW to distinguish themselves from others. Beyond that, they believe that stronger personal BJW conveys specific images of being likable, competent, and successful.
All in all, general BJW is often related to harsh responses to other people (e.g., disadvantaged individuals or groups) and derogation of victims, which can be seen as a negative or maladaptive side-effect of BJW, whereas, in contrast personal BJW is rather linked to subjective well-being or interpersonal trust, which seems to be a positive or adaptive consequence of a high BJW
The unexpected result was that people with high personal BJW weren't significantly more just than people with no/or little such belief.
People with higher general BJW expectedly have it easier to justify their own dishonest behavior (e.g. "it doesn't matter what I do now justice will be served in the great scheme of things").
Good that you bring this up. Other comments here do not seem to be aware that this study is only saying one type of just world believers are likely to be dishonest.
Others here seem to think all just world believers are likely to be dishonest.
Just because you think the world is unjust doesn't mean you are likely to be honest.
What matters is what you think about others. Do you think other people are living in a just world? e.g. do you think homeless people are mostly drug addicts? If you do then it is very likely you are a dishonest person.
I'd like to provide my anecdotal experience with the just-world worldview.
During a short period, I experienced a few events outside my control that shook my sense of security. One was a family member becoming ill, and the other was war.
I was in distress: my world-view at the time was implicitly built around justice, and it could not account for what was happening.
Over a few months, I found comfort in a different world-view: that justice is a fiction. That brought me so much comfort that it seemed almost like joy. This is my current world-view.
A more elaborate description of this world-view is that morality, justice, caring, altruism, and all the other good things, only have an effect in-so-far as they have an effect, if that makes sense. No more, no less. They're tools, constructs and behaviours, and, on their own, without context, they are meaningless. This is harder to formulate that I expected.
I have noticed that with this mindset, I have become more selfish, less considerate. On the plus side, I have become calmer and more level-headed.
I now also find it easier to sympathize with both "perpetrators" of injustice, as well as with "victims" of injustice. Before, I sympathized more with the victims, and tended to dismiss the aggressors. Now, I don't feel like there's a qualitative difference between the two, to put it harshly.
I'm not sure what to make of this yet. My new, "selfish" mindset is definitely an adaptation to injustices I perceived, and might be a regression. But, also, it might be that I have discarded a less-than-useful concept of justice from my mind, and now that I don't identify with "victims" anymore, I have to build up another foundation for cooperative behaviour.
(answering with a long quotation which became part of my worldview)
“All right," said Susan. "I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need... fantasies to make life bearable."
REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.
"Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—"
YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.
"So we can believe the big ones?"
YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.
"They're not the same at all!"
YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME...SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.
"Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the point—"
I’m sitting here pondering what you wrote and trying to understand what you mean. “Life isn’t fair”, or just for that matter, are absolutely true in my opinion. However, justice is still a goal worth striving for. Do you still agree with that, or did that go out the door because of your experiences? And, I am sorry for the harsh experiences you’ve had. I can relate to loved ones being sick, but thankfully not to war.
Hey, thanks for relating. To answer your question, I guess I've become a bit "robotic", for the lack of a better word, about justice. I find that kindness, protection, being fair, etc. are important ways to take care of others, which to some extent is pleasant on its own, but also can have desirable knock-on effects. In short, good will leads to good will. I don't experience it as a moral or metaphysical dilemma, but as a calculation.
From your posts, it sounds like you've been through a lot. Have you been doing any therapy or counseling to help out? I've been going through a lot too, and even a tiny bit of counseling has helped me out.
I'm genuinely not trying to dismiss your feelings or thoughts, just hoping that you are getting the help you need in such a trying time. I hope things get better for you and your's.
Hey, thanks for your concern. I hope that things go well for you as well. I'd say I'm not that bad off. While I don't feel like counseling is something I urgently need, I'm sure it would have a positive effect, and I'd love to do it some time.
Having never thought I needed counseling, after having had some, I wish everyone could do it (assuming you find a good counselor). Hope you get that chance to try it.
I believe the world is neither just nor unjust - it only doesn't give by default a rat's ass on me. And on top of that it's uncontrollable and mostly incomprehensible (at least the forward looking part). So yeah that puts me in a selfish position. But. Cooperation always did and still does bring advantages to me, so I'm all in for cooperation. I also believe that win-win is the best basis for a future cooperation as well, so that's what I strive for. Thus what I perceive as "injustice" is a crime against cooperation, thus indirectly against me and gets no support.
Having children is a pretty good one! Relationships with trust.
You're not necessarily more selfish just because you're not trying to 'care' about everything so much anymore, you're just being more rational. You focus your sympathy/compassion and care on those they can affect, where you can apply understanding and judgement.
Justice is not moral. Understanding is moral, IMO.
Sounds like you're traumatised tbh. I suspect that adopting the dog-eat-dog mentality does not lead to a happy life, esp. for people who were previously more compassionate.
"Now, I don't feel like there's a qualitative difference between the two, to put it harshly."
There isnt. I'm cool with psychopathic killers and rapists being locked up indefinitely and/or killed by the state on my behalf. In reality, we have not fully considered the drivers of their behavior nor tailored the response to be compassionate of their circumstances.
Are they mentally ill? Did they grow up in an orphanage where they were abused and humiliated daily by the other kids and staff?
We don't have time for such questions and considerations because we have to get them off the street.
We tell ourselves it is justice because the truth takes far too many resources to fully reconcile.
> we recruited 501 American participants from Amazon Mechanical Turk
The Mechanical Turk folks are the new sociology students. This study has 100% chance of not being reproducible or statistically representative.
> 63.3% of the participants reported having flipped the winning outcome [...] in a previous study using a similar coin-toss game with an online (MTurk) sample (Schindler and Pfattheicher, 2017), 76.7% of the participants reported having flipped the winning coin-side
So, just world people are 13% more honest than the general population? How can you name the title then "General Belief in a Just World Is Positively Associated with Dishonest Behavior" when clearly, everybody is dishonest and these bunch were actually... less so?
> Given that general BJW was found to be linked to antisocial tendencies, we expected stronger general BJW to be linked to more dishonesty.
I postulate academia strongly correlates with dishonesty.
No, 63.3% of all participants got a favourable outcome, so 13% cheated (suggesting 26% would cheat if necessary, as half got a favourable outcome without cheating).
The participants all had varying degrees of belief in a just world which were measured with a six-item test. The results of that test correlated significantly with the chance of a favourable self-reported coin toss.
It is meaningless to draw inferences from comparisons to another study, as they were selected differently so there's no control, and it isn't necessary as this study contains a random and varied sample of participants.
Yes, there is a question over the representativeness of Mechanical Turk workers. But even though they're surely different on average from the average human, this study is controlled by comparing them to each other rather than to some pre-determined statistics, so the sampling bias should be largely cancelled out, barring second-order interactions.
> Yes, there is a question over the representativeness of Mechanical Turk workers.
There are more fundamental issues. Having run several studies either with MTurk or panel providers who use MTurk to source some/most of their respondents, I have trouble trusting any study with an MTurk sample that doesn't explicitly show 1. how they verified respondent location and demographics and 2. how they controlled for bots and mindless click-throughs.
Even though they used a convenience sample, issues like reading comprehension (which you can get from non-native English speakers VPN'ing through a US-based IP) and participants trying to get through the study as quickly as possible - or automating their responses altogether - absolutely matter.
I post fairly often here about how terrible different studies are. And many are pretty bad!
This... is a horrifically bad take on the study.
> So, just world people are 13% more honest than the general population? How can you name the title then "General Belief in a Just World Is Positively Associated with Dishonest Behavior" when clearly, everybody is dishonest and these bunch were actually... less so?
What!?
How can you arbitrarily compare another study that used a different experimental design to this one? Just pick out two percentages that are totally unrelated, subtract them, and then complain about something?
This is like saying, 30% of bananas in my house are bad. 42% of cars on my street are red. Why do I have this huge 12% gap between the two!? What nonsense.
> I postulate academia strongly correlates with dishonesty.
I postulate that reading comprehension is important! And that maybe, if you don't know what you're talking about, you shouldn't dump on people's work?
That being said. There are issues with this study. In addition to MTurk being noisy, the primary problem is that the effect size is very small! The authors deftly hide this in the standard way by not plotting the raw data (likelihood of cheating vs belief in a just world), which would show a very small difference. This is yet again a case of "we found a statistically significant but likely meaningless and unlikely to be replicated difference".
> The authors deftly hide this in the standard way by not plotting the raw data (likelihood of cheating vs belief in a just world), which would show a very small difference.
Yet another datapoint to suggest the gp post that academia strongly correlates with dishonesty.
> Yet another datapoint to suggest the gp post that academia strongly correlates with dishonesty.
There's no dishonesty here!
They are reporting data to the standard of their community. We need to raise the level of rigor and convince people to drop the entire concept of statistically significant as meaning anything at all. This all taking far too long unfortunately.
Statisticians made a terrible terrible mistake that doomed science to this bullshit for nearly a century now. People like Pearson and Fisher had good intentions, but the language they used for their methods makes them sound too attractive. So people interpret their methods to be something they are not. We need an overhaul of teaching throughout statistics to excise this cancer now, and that's going to just be very slow.
So no. Authors are doing what they were taught, what is likely best practices in their textbook. It's just that the textbook has been wrong for far too long.
Hiding the fact that their textual claims don't match their data using various tricks is bog standard academic dishonesty, you see it all the time in anything social or related to public health. It's an endemic problem.
Trying to blame prior generations for defining P thresholds that are "too attractive", or just doing what they were taught, instead of blaming the current authors for doing the wrong things is absurd. No textbook is telling these people to use MTurk or not to draw proper graphs!
The people who compared to the prior study are the authors of this study, right? Shouldn't you take up your complaint with them?
Or rather, don't, because the two studies clearly are comparable. The point of science, whether social or otherwise, is to tell us true things about the world. If the response to comparing the results of two very similar studies is "you can't do that" then this research effort isn't producing generalizable knowledge, which makes it worthless.
The description of why people who believed in a just world might be more dishonest seemed to be a highly complicated chain of rationalization that I don't think most people would make.
How do you tell anyway that people believe in a just world? I didn't follow that in the document. Do you assign believe in a just world to people's statements on the matter, if so I offer a counter theory - Noticeable statements of belief in a just world is positively associated with dishonest behavior, and under this theory people who are dishonest say they believe in a just world a lot to make other people think they can't be dishonest, they're talking about honesty all the time!
I fail to see how psychology studies are at all useful. Like what do they teach us? The setups are always frail and the studied population is always Mechanical Turk workers or college students. The conclusions are always beyond far reaching.
Edit: drinking game: drink every time I use the word always. I guess that's how frustrating I find this field. sigh
I'm not sure that those really are the extremes. I think quite a lot of people believe that justice may or may not ever happen depending on how we choose to act as a civilization. Even further than that, many people believe injustice is an inevitable feature of existence.
Layman theory ahead. Empathy is a feature but it is in conflict with harsh parts of reality. Mind always tries to resolve conflicts either by action or by reinterpretation for it to work. When there’s no adequate action and no stops for reinterpretation (e.g. lack of knowledge or general intelligence), it has nothing to do but write it off as one’s own fault, fate, or natural balance. It is dishonesty by very design and it gave birth to many societal phenomena.
> As expected, general BJW significantly predicted the probability of flipping the winning coin side, with higher levels leading to a higher probability.
Maybe the Just World was just rewarding people who believed in the Just World by granting them the desired coin flip?
One central tenet of Buddhism is the belief in karma: you will rip what you sow (in many previous lives). Thus it’s safe to say almost all Asian believe in a just world. According to this study, this will make the Asian comparatively more dishonest??
There is an another aspect: if you believe in karma, in general it will also affect your behaviors, make you more likely to adjust your actions towards other beings, be less harsh to other people, a bit more moral. How will that make you more dishonest? I would say belief in god’s judgment is also a form of karma. Will that make all Christians more dishonest?
Somehow it’s very hard for me to believe!
Karma isn't as simple as the common beliefs about it.
"Karma" just means action; supposedly, actions sow seeds that have consequences. Those consequences may materialise in this life, or not. Only the most consequential actions plant seeds that endure into the next life.
Karma teachings aren't really Buddhist; the Buddha just taught what was the common belief system in his time. Karma comes from the Vedas.
> How will that make you more dishonest?
I don't think belief in karma makes you less harsh to others. I think it leads to a sort of tokenism: "I've done my kind act for today". And I think it leads to a sort of devil-take-the-hindmost attitude to people who are suffering: they are "working out their karma", i.e. their suffering is actually good for them.
I had a similar thought: BJW seems like a pretty strong defense mechanism. Somewhat simplistically you could say that one purpose of defense mechanisms is to be able to bend the rules a bit without feeling too bad about ourselves. It’s perhaps not very surprising that people with strong defense mechanisms behave more antisocially.
BJW may be taken as a proxy for common religious convictions, specifically those that posit fairness mechanisms such as heaven/hell, karma, reincarnation.
It is clearly smart to use the BJW designation instead, to avoid being pilloried.
I disagree. Understanding and fairness is worth striving for. Justice implies retribution, of being wronged and having to 'right' things. It is, as they say, in the eye of the beholder and justice is not equal to all beholders.
I don't think that's true. It's sometimes taken to include retribution; but a lot (most?) justice is about reverting the consequences of "wrong" actions - inadvertent or deliberate. So the victim of a wrong action is restored to the position they would be in if the action had not been taken.
I see retribution as distinct from justice; in addition to putting things right again, "We are now going to visit on you the Universe's retribution for your moral turpitude". Bzzzt.
I'm fairly skeptical of any of the social sciences per issues with the demarcation problem and reproduction of results. I'm even more so of studies with any ideological, political, or religious bend to them. That said, with the world as clearly unjust as it is at present, I do wonder who (beyond perhaps the most sheltered and naive of individuals) would still believe that the world itself is innately just? Most Western and Eastern religions teach that it is after we pass on that we are judged, not in this world. Class struggle based secular left philosophy is downright obsessed with the notion of injustice. Perhaps only secular, right, Darwinian philosophies could lead one down this road, and as a formerly right-wing atheist, I can tell you that it's not a very common world view in the least. So I'm guessing this is largely a selection bias for people who haven't thought too deeply about their views or values and are niave to how the world works.
I assume you're talking about social Darwinism when referring to Darwinian philosophies? You might want to specify that to distinguish it from the application of Darwinian thinking to the social sciences, which I think is the right way forward scientifically and has nothing to do with moral judgements.
Unless I'm mistaken, correlated means there is a relation. We don't know what the cause is, but we can see there is a relation. Meaning they at least appear to have something to do with each other. If we could show they have nothing to do with each other, they would no longer be correlated.
The cause of that correlation may not be what we think. Your link of "spurious" correlations has many examples. I would suggest there actually is a link between those things, but it's a 3rd factor of some sort. For example, the correlation between suicides and spending on scientific research may be correlated via a connection to prosperous societies. A society with more money will spend more on science. And there's lots of research to show that wealth leads to higher instances of mental health issues. So the correlation is real, but it doesn't mean one caused the other.
All of which is my long-winded way of saying I think there's tremendous value in these kinds of studies.
As I have said already in another reply to that post, what I mean is not all correlations are worth discussing. Obviously it has value from a scientific perspective but that doesn't mean it'll lead to any useful conversation. In fact it generally just seems to lead to insinuations and generalizations about large groups with little to no real evidence.
>I would suggest there actually is a link between those things, but it's a 3rd factor of some sort. For example, the correlation between suicides and spending on scientific research may be correlated via a connection to prosperous societies.
Edit: Not quite. What the graph is saying is there's a direct correlation between the how much the United States budget allocates to science, space and technology from year to year and suicide specifically by strangulation and hanging. There may be some vague link between suicide and science spending, but this is saying something much more specific than that.
> Unless I'm mistaken, correlated means there is a relation
Well the short rude answer is you are mistaken. The longer answer is that some correlated things have underlying causal relationships: one causes the other, vice versa, or a third unspecified correlate is causative.
But see that word some ? It's important. Because some are entirely unrelated, and the word correlated is not co-related in a causative sense. You might find piracy corollelates with consumption of potato chips. It doesn't have to mean anything.
The relation goes to trend: up or down. Positive or negative correlation. Why? The "why" kind of related, is different. Correlation is observed relationship, not functional, actual, causative relationship until a mechanistc reason is found, or it's absence is understood, and it's just.. pirates and chips.
The problem here is english. "Related" has different meanings.
> Correlation is observed relationship, not functional, actual, causative relationship until a mechanistc reason is found, or it's absence is understood, and it's just.. pirates and chips.
Be careful though: causal relationships exist where they do, and humans may not be able to find them and thus classify a causal relationship as merely a correlation.
I think correlation != causation misleads a lot of people on places like Reddit.
> Correlation doesn't equal causation
>
> For example, here are some weird correlations of no real significance
This is an nonsense take on science. Your two statements are totally unrelated to one another and mean completely different things mathematically.
Those graphs with "weird" correlations were generated backwards. They had data and looked for lines that look similar. Scientific studies are generated forwards (usually, let's not talk about retrospective studies which tend to produce junk "science"). We have a hypothesis we manipulate it and we see if there is an association.
If you write down the math for these two scenarios they are completely different statistically!
In one, you're always going to find another pretty line to match if you have data. It means nothing!
In the other, the likelihood of two things being correlated in your experiment when they are totally unrelated to one another is very low (assuming your experiment is designed well). The question is generally, what is the path from the variable I manipulated to the effect, not "random stuff happens, lets forget about science and live in this cave now."
So please stop saying "Correlation doesn't equal causation" it's nonsense that "smart" people repeat and then link to that website without understanding what's happening.
That website doesn't debunk science, where we run experiments without knowing the results. It debunks charlatans and liars that say "X looks like Y so they must be correlated". That's not what we do in science.
Correlation doesn't prove that two things are related; it does suggest it though. And a lack of correllation doesn't prove the two things are unrelated.
So a correlation between general BJW and dishonesty might be because both phenomena have the same underlying cause. That doesn't render the research meaningless. On the contrary, the correlation means that something is going on, and we need to look into what that is.
Causation or nothing is a false distinction. Pointing to the existence of some correlations that are spurious does not mean that all correlations are spurious. Every causation results in correlation.
Spurious correlations are easy to find, particularly with 10 data points and hundreds of variables to choose from (lol), but multiple hypothesis testing reveals those as spurious easily.
Technically true, but not every weak correlation is worth talking about. I would have thought HN had more rigor than that. If you guys want to talk correlations, there are much more interesting ones like 'Internet Explorer marketshare is positively associated with murder rate'.
Just because correlation doesn't equal correlation doesn't mean that correlation can't provide evidence that a model of behavior is correct.
When you can't measure something directly you make predictions of what it causes and then measure them. If that occurs it provides evidence that model is correct.
That doesn't mean that correlation means nothing though. It might mean something, or it might not. Correlation studies can give pointers as to where to concentrate more research efforts. That's valuable because money doesn't grow on trees and research costs money.
I’m not going to win any upvotes for saying this but I think it’s worth mentioning that this study is dishonest, blatantly politically-themed, and likely intended to score points within the authors’ circle. In other words, it’s meant to be printed off and used as toilet paper. Seeing papers like this is a frightening reminder, at least for me, about how inefficient and wasteful our society has become, in that we continue to funnel large amounts of resources to professions or groups like this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis
They found that people who have a strong tendency to believe in a just world also tend to be more religious, more authoritarian, more conservative, more likely to admire political leaders and existing social institutions, and more likely to have negative attitudes toward underprivileged groups.
Why do people believe in the just-world fallacy? The just-world theory (Lerner, 1980) assumes that people want to believe that they live in a world where good things happen to good people and bad things only to bad ones and where therefore everyone harvests what they sow (see also Furnham, 2003; Dalbert, 2009; Hafer and Sutton, 2016).Sep 25, 2017
Who believes in a just world? Believers in a just world have been found to be more religious, more authoritarian, and more oriented toward the internal control of reinforcements than nonbelievers. They are also more likely to admire political leaders and existing social institutions, and to have negative attitudes toward underprivileged groups.