General belief in a just world is associated with dishonest behavior (2017)

The just-world hypothesis or just-world fallacy is the cognitive bias that assumes that &quot;people get what they deserve&quot; – 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&#x2F;or order. It is often associated with a variety of fundamental fallacies, especially in regard to rationalizing suffering on the grounds that the sufferers &quot;deserve&quot; it.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Just-world_hypothesis" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Just-world_hypothesis</a><p>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.<p>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<p>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.

Two types of BJW (general and personal) are investigated in this study: <i>higher general BJW was linked to more dishonest behavior</i> and <i>there was no significant relationship between personal BJW and levels of dishonesty</i>.<p>General BJW: <i>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.</i><p>Personal BJW: <i>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.</i><p><i>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</i><p>The unexpected result was that people with high <i>personal BJW</i> weren&#x27;t significantly <i>more just</i> than people with no&#x2F;or little such belief.<p>People with higher general BJW expectedly have it easier to justify their own dishonest behavior (e.g. &quot;it doesn&#x27;t matter what I do now justice will be served in the great scheme of things&quot;).

I&#x27;d like to provide my anecdotal experience with the just-world worldview.<p>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.<p>I was in distress: my world-view at the time was implicitly built around justice, and it could not account for what was happening.<p>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.<p>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&#x27;re tools, constructs and behaviours, and, on their own, without context, they are meaningless. This is harder to formulate that I expected.<p>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.<p>I now also find it easier to sympathize with both &quot;perpetrators&quot; of injustice, as well as with &quot;victims&quot; of injustice. Before, I sympathized more with the victims, and tended to dismiss the aggressors. Now, I don&#x27;t feel like there&#x27;s a qualitative difference between the two, to put it harshly.<p>I&#x27;m not sure what to make of this yet. My new, &quot;selfish&quot; 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&#x27;t identify with &quot;victims&quot; anymore, I have to build up another foundation for cooperative behaviour.

&gt; we recruited 501 American participants from Amazon Mechanical Turk<p>The Mechanical Turk folks are the new sociology students. This study has 100% chance of not being reproducible or statistically representative.<p>&gt; 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<p>So, just world people are 13% more honest than the general population? How can you name the title then &quot;General Belief in a Just World Is Positively Associated with Dishonest Behavior&quot; when clearly, everybody is dishonest and these bunch were actually... less so?<p>&gt; Given that general BJW was found to be linked to antisocial tendencies, we expected stronger general BJW to be linked to more dishonesty.<p>I postulate academia strongly correlates with dishonesty.

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&#x27;t think most people would make.<p>How do you tell anyway that people believe in a just world? I didn&#x27;t follow that in the document. Do you assign believe in a just world to people&#x27;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&#x27;t be dishonest, they&#x27;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.<p>Edit: drinking game: drink every time I use the word always. I guess that&#x27;s how frustrating I find this field. <i>sigh</i>

&quot;Belief in a just world&quot; is pretty vague, because it can mean both<p>1. That justice will <i>eventually</i> happen.<p>2. That justice has <i>already</i> happened, and what you&#x27;re looking at that looks like injustice to you actually isn&#x27;t.<p>I think everyone falls between those two extremes in practice.

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.

&gt; As expected, general BJW significantly predicted the probability of flipping the winning coin side, with higher levels leading to a higher probability.<p>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!

Destiny is the metaphysical expression of narcissism, the cosmic projection of the navel.

BJW may be taken as a proxy for common religious convictions, specifically those that posit fairness mechanisms such as heaven&#x2F;hell, karma, reincarnation.<p>It is clearly smart to use the BJW designation instead, to avoid being pilloried.

The world isn&#x27;t just but justice is worth striving for.

I mean, anyone who&#x27;s willing to lie to themselves about everything they see around them in the world has to be dishonest, right?

Social science has a replication crisis and small sample size problem.<p>I find this interesting though if I thought it was true.

I&#x27;m fairly skeptical of any of the social sciences per issues with the demarcation problem and reproduction of results. I&#x27;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&#x27;s not a very common world view in the least. So I&#x27;m guessing this is largely a selection bias for people who haven&#x27;t thought too deeply about their views or values and are niave to how the world works.

Obvious explanation: People who lie when they are asked whether they believe in a just world, lie more in general.

Is this a roundabout way of saying belief in utopias is really not a good strategy for life.<p>Or don’t trust anyone who believes in a utopian world…

&quot;Positively associated&quot;. So this is just a correlational study that means nothing.

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.