JUST WORLD HYPOTHESIS

Just World Hypothesis

Just World Hypothesis

Introduction

The belief in a just world refers to the view that the world is a fair place in which people generally get what they deserve. This belief helps people feel that they have control over their lives and will not suffer unjustly; as such, it serves a protective function. People are motivated to hold onto their belief in a just world and attempt to interpret the events in their own and others' lives in ways that are consistent with it. For example, when people see others suffering, they will try to help, but if they cannot compensate the victims or ease their suffering, they will persuade themselves that the victims deserve to suffer. This has important societal implications. To maintain just world beliefs, people react to innocent victims by blaming them for the injustices they face. Thus, this motivation to believe in social justice could actually undermine real social justice. This entry looks at the history and social significance of the just world hypothesis.

Literature Review

Melvin Lerner formulated the just world hypothesis on the basis of a series of experiments he began in the mid-1960s. In the first experiment, participants were asked to observe two people completing a task, one of whom was randomly chosen to be paid for the work. Even though participants knew that payment was awarded by chance, they still believed that the worker who was paid was actually more deserving of payment (Lerner, 1980).

In a second experiment, Melvin Lerner and Carolyn Simmons found that people will reinterpret events so they are consistent with their belief that people get what they deserve. When given the opportunity to restore justice and compensate a victim for her suffering, most participants in the experiment chose to do so (Lerner & Simmons, 1966). However, when participants could not compensate the victim and instead saw her suffering continue, they derogated the victim, especially when they thought the victim had agreed to endure such suffering out of altruistic motives. According to the just world hypothesis, watching an innocent person suffer threatens observers' just world beliefs. To restore the view that people get what they deserve, observers will devalue the victim. The less deserved or compensated the suffering, the greater the devaluation of the victim.

This early experimental work emphasized the motivation that all people have to believe in a just world, especially when they find themselves in certain situations. In the mid-1970s, Zick Rubin and Anne Peplau proposed that, in addition to situations varying in the degree to which they evoke just world concerns, individuals vary in the degree to which they endorse just world beliefs (Rubin and Peplau, 1975). To measure these enduring individual differences, they developed the Just World Scale with items such as “Basically, the world is a just place” and “Generally, people deserve what they get.”

In their first study, groups of draft-eligible men listened to the live radio broadcast of the 1971 national draft lottery to hear their priority numbers for the ...