Just World
Overview
The just-world hypothesis (or just-world fallacy) is the tendency to believe that the world is fundamentally fair, so that people get what they deserve and deserve what they get. Melvin Lerner demonstrated it in the 1960s: observers who watched a person receive electric shocks and could do nothing about it came to rate the victim as less likeable, as if the suffering had to be earned.
Notes
- It is comforting, because a fair world is a predictable one in which one's own good conduct is protective. It is also the root of victim-blaming: the poor must be lazy, the assaulted must have provoked it, the sick must have done something.
- Religions institutionalise it. Karma makes every misfortune the earned result of a previous life; the punishment theodicy makes suffering a judgement; the law of attraction makes illness something the patient attracted. Each turns the intuition into a doctrine and the victim into a defendant.
- The test is to ask whether one would accept the same explanation of one's own misfortune.