Just-world Beliefs Research Articles

Belief in a just world and social dominance orientation: Evidence for a mediational pathway predicting negative attitudes and discrimination against individuals with mental illness

Prejudice against individuals with mental illness stems from multiple factors, including the personality traits of those harboring the prejudiced attitudes. However, little is known about the personality processes (as opposed to static correlates) leading to negative attitudes and discrimination toward individuals with mental illness. The present research tested a mediational model in which negative attitudes against such people and resulting intentions to discriminate are distally rooted in just-world beliefs, which predispose people toward higher social dominance orientation, a well-known proximal personality predictor of general prejudice. Participants completed measures of behavioral intentions, attitudes toward individuals with mental illness, social dominance orientation, and belief in a just world. The proposed mediational model was supported, and an alternative causal model was not. These results illuminate the personality-process antecedents of attitudes toward individuals with mental illness and provide a foundation for research targeting interventions intended to reduce prejudice and discrimination against this population.

Belief in a just world and wellbeing in Indian schools

This study investigates the meaning of belief in just world (BJW) for students' subjective justice experiences with their parents and teachers and for students' subjective well-being. The hypotheses tested were that the more strongly students endorse BJW, the less the distress at school and depressive symptoms they experience. Two dimensions of BJW were assessed: personal BJW, reflecting the belief that events in one's own life are generally just, and general BJW, reflecting the belief that the world is basically a just place. The participants were 278 Indian students attending ten 10th grade classes at two private English-medium schools. The results showed that only the personal BJW, not the general BJW, was important in explaining justice experiences and wellbeing. The more the students endorsed the belief in personal just world, the more they felt treated justly by their teachers and their parents alike, and the less distress at school and depressive symptoms they experienced. In addition, teacher justice, but not parent justice, explained distress at school. Finally, the effect of personal BJW on depressive symptoms was partly mediated by both teacher and parent justice. This pattern of results persisted when class effects were controlled. Overall, this pattern of results emphasizes the importance of the individual and subjective experience of justice of the teacher behavior for adolescent wellbeing. Implications for further studies on BJW and wellbeing at school are discussed.

Are Just-World Beliefs Compatible with Justifying Inequality? Collective Political Efficacy as a Moderator

Previous research demonstrates that the belief in a just world is often accompanied by the justification of social inequality and by low socio-political participation (e.g., Jost and Hunyady, Curr Direct Psychol Sci 14:260–265, 2005). However, studies provide evidence that the relations may be moderated by individual differences such as a person’s self-efficacy expectations to promote justice and equality (Mohiyeddini and Montada, Responses to victimization and belief in a just world, 1998). At the societal level, collective political efficacy has consistently been found to foster political participation (cf. Lee, Int J Public Opin Res 22:392–411, 2010). In our study, we tested whether collective political efficacy may attenuate the negative social impact of the belief in a just world: It is predicted that when collective political efficacy is low, a strong belief in a just world would increase the motivation to justify inequality. By contrast, when collective political efficacy is high, the belief in a just world would not increase, but potentially decrease the motivation to justify inequality. In turn, justification of inequality is expected to negatively affect socio-political participation. Data from 150 university students were analyzed using moderated structural equation modeling. In our study, the expected moderating effect of collective political efficacy on the relation between belief in a just world and justification of inequality was established empirically. When collective political efficacy was high, justification of inequality did not inevitably increase with the belief in a just world. In addition, the impact of belief in a just world on justice-promoting behavior was mediated by justification of inequality. Implications for theory and future research are discussed.

The relationship of clients’ social class to early therapeutic impressions

Using case vignettes that differed in the presentation of the client's social class, the influence of social class on therapeutic impressions was studied in the context of just-world beliefs. Results suggested that (1) participants with higher levels of belief in a just world saw poor and working-class clients as more unpleasant to work with and more dysfunctional and (2) working-class vignettes were associated with the lowest predictions of session depth and smoothness. The findings suggest that counselors may respond differently to clients based on their social class, and in a way that negatively predisposes them toward work with poor and working-class clients.

When just-world beliefs promote and when they inhibit forgiveness

The present study provides further evidence that justice and forgiveness are not necessarily competitive responses. Among 157 undergraduates instructed to recall either serious or benign transgressions, just-world beliefs for the self (BJW-self) was associated with forgiveness as inhibition of negative responding but not forgiveness as positive responding. Each of these relations was significantly moderated by transgression severity: the more benign the transgression, the stronger the relationship. Just-world beliefs for others (BJW-others) was negatively associated with inhibition of negative responding and unrelated to positive responding. These relations held over and above well-established predictors of transgression-specific forgiveness (relationship closeness and post-transgression offender effort), and an individual difference variable, justice sensitivity. In practical terms, BJW-self may enable people to better deal with minor stressors. An important theoretical implication is that modelling the relationship between just-world beliefs and forgiveness requires a bidimensional conception of both constructs.

Justifying Inequality: A Cross-Temporal Investigation of U.S. Income Disparities and Just-World Beliefs from 1973 to 2006

This cross-temporal meta-analysis examined 6,120 American college students’ scores on the Belief in a Just World Scale (BJW; Rubin and Peplau, J Soc Issues 31(3):65–90, 1975) across the last three and a half decades. Drawing on models of belief threat, we examined whether the causal relationship between perceived injustice and increases in BJW could extend from the laboratory to society by using macro-economic injustice trends to predict changes in BJW across these decades. Specifically, we hypothesized that perceptions of inequality, operationalized as rising income disparities, would result in a greater need to justify this inequality and that this would be evidenced by increased commitment to just world beliefs over time. Consistent with this prediction, BJW scores increased significantly over time and this increase was positively related to increasing income disparities in society. Income inequality remained a significant predictor of BJW scores even after controlling for additional factors of general income and political ideology. Implications of increasing just world beliefs are discussed in terms of psychological and policy outcomes.

On the Psychology of the Belief in a Just World: Exploring Experiential and Rationalistic Paths to Victim Blaming

This article examines why people may blame innocent victims of robbery or sexual assault. We propose that in experiential mind-sets associative links are formed between the victim and the negative event. As the creation of such links is independent of explicit beliefs, people in experiential mind-sets produce negative reactions to the victim independent of their just-world beliefs. Rationalistic mind-sets, however, instigate propositional and consistency-based reasoning. For people who strongly endorse just-world beliefs (such as people who have strong predispositions to believe that the world is just or whose just-world beliefs have been threatened strongly), learning about an innocent victim creates a logically inconsistent system of beliefs. This inconsistency can be resolved by blaming the victim. For people who only weakly endorse just-world beliefs, there is no inconsistency in the first place and therefore no need to blame the victim. Two experiments support this line of reasoning.

We Blame Innocent Victims More Than I Do: Self-Construal Level Moderates Responses to Just-World Threats

This study investigated the impact of self-construal levels on people's tendency to blame innocent victims for the victims' fates. The authors hypothesized that when the belief in a just world is threatened, social self-construal is associated with more victim blaming than individual self-construal is. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants were primed with either the individual self (with the word I) or the social self (with the word we). Results indeed showed that when threats to just-world beliefs were high, social self-activation produced more victim blaming than individual self-activation did. This effect was not found when just-world threats were low. Extending on these findings, Experiment 3 revealed that, following a just-world threat, an independent self-construal measure was negatively related to victim blaming, and an interdependent self-construal measure was positively related to victim blaming. It is concluded that self-construal levels are important to understanding the justice motive.

Religion and Helping: Impact of Target Thinking Styles and Just-World Beliefs

Previous research on religion and helping has left some questions unanswered. In the present study, participants expressed willingness to help groups of people in need (homeless people and illegal immigrants), and this after having been religiously versus non-religiously stimulated. The activation of religious context increased the willingness to help, but only the homeless. Orthodox religious people tended to consider the targets responsible for their problem, an association partially mediated by the belief in a just world for other. Symbolic thinking was associated with willingness for helping, an association partially mediated by the belief in ultimate justice. Results suggest a limited (target) and conditional (thinking style, just world beliefs) prosociality as a consequence of religion.

Effects of status and outcome on attributions and just-world beliefs: How the social distribution of success and failure may be rationalized

The distribution of success and failure to social groups is supported by lay theories about the characteristics of social groups and the causes of their outcomes, as well as by beliefs about entitlement of groups to succeed or fail. This paper presents a study where a target individual’s socio-economic status (high vs. low) and outcome in a major academic achievement task (success vs. failure) were manipulated in a 2 × 2 experimental design. It was found that high-status success and low-status failure, i.e. the system-consistent outcomes, were attributed relatively more to stable internal causes (ability), whereas high-status failure and low-status success, i.e. the system-inconsistent outcomes, were attributed relatively more to unstable causes (effort). Second, participants’ belief in a just world was higher in high-status success and low-status failure than in high-status failure and low-status success.

Meaning making and psychological adjustment following cancer: The mediating roles of growth, life meaning, and restored just-world beliefs.

Cancer survivors' efforts at meaning making may influence the extent to which they successfully make meaning from their experience (i.e., experience posttraumatic growth, find life meaningful, and restore beliefs in a just world), which may, in turn, influence their psychological adjustment. Previous research regarding both meaning making processes and meanings made as determinants of adjustment has shown inconsistent effects, partly because of the lack of clearly articulated theoretical frameworks and problematic research strategies. In a 1-year longitudinal study, the authors distinguished the meaning making process from the outcomes of that process (meanings made), employing specific measures of both. The authors tested pathways through which meaning making efforts led to 3 different meanings made (growth, life meaning, and restored just-world belief) in a sample of 172 young to middle-age adult cancer survivors, and they explored whether those meanings made mediated the effect of meaning making efforts on psychological adjustment. Cross-sectional and longitudinal path models of the meaning making process indicate that meaning making efforts are related to better adjustment through the successful creation of adaptive meanings made from the cancer experience. The authors conclude with clinical implications and suggestions for future research.

The Effect of Race-Crime Typicality on Judicial Sentencing Decisions

This paper combined economic and psychological theory to test whether, when sentencing criminal cases, adhere to statistic-based stereotypes relating the race of an offender to the crime committed. Past research suggests that white and black offenders committing crimes that are perceived to be typical for their race are sentenced more harshly than those committing race-atypical crimes. Furthermore, there is evidence that this effect may be mediated by the dispositional or situational attribution of guilt, and that expectations of recidivism based on statistical discrimination may also impact sentence severity. This study examined how race-crime typicality, attributions of guilt, and recidivism influenced how law student judges sentenced white and black offenders for six crimes varying in race-typicality and severity. The results showed no effect of race-crime typicality on sentence length, however there was a direct effect of race on sentence: white offenders were sentenced more harshly than black offenders. Moreover, white defendants received more dispositional attributions than black defendants, and nonwhite gave more extreme attributions of guilt than did white judges. White and nonwhite mock also differed in their decision-making processes. For white mock judges, attribution mediated the relationship between defendant race and expectations of recidivism (without significantly affecting sentencing severity); for nonwhite mock judges, attribution mediated the relationship between defendant race and sentence severity. These results are explained in terms of statistical discrimination, just-world belief, and social dominance orientation.

Just World and the Emotional Defense of Self

This research examines how individuals with different affect regulation strategies cope with just-world threats. Our study demonstrated that individuals who poorly downregulate negative affect (a state-oriented style) more avidly attempt to defend a just world after this opportunity is offered via an authority figure when that belief of a just world was threatened than do individuals who successfully downregulate negative affect (an action-oriented style), after a filler task. Sizable differences thus exist in how individuals defend their just-world beliefs as a function of how people deal with their affective states.

Belief in a Personal Just World, Justice Judgments, and Their Functions for Prisoners

This study focuses on the relationship between the experience of justice, belief in a just world (BJW), and the feelings of adult male prisoners. The sample comprised 100 adult male prisoners from a German prison. Regression analysis provided evidence for the assimilation function of the BJW: High believers evaluated the legal proceedings, their interpersonal treatment by their corrections officers, and decisions on prison affairs as more just; they reported better well-being and were less likely to express anger as outburst behavior. Interpersonal justice was particularly important in explaining well-being. The results persisted when controlling for social desirability, criminal background, and personal background. The role of BJW and interpersonal justice as a resource for adaptive social behavior and subjective well-being is discussed.

Looking ahead through lenses of justice: The relevance of just‐world beliefs to intentions and confidence in the future

Recent research distinguishes the belief in a just-world for the self (BJW-self) from that for others (BJW-others), showing BJW-self to be associated with subjective well-being and BJW-others to be associated with harsh social attitudes. The present research examines the implications of these two types of just-world belief for aspects of motivation and ideation about the future. A sample of 100 young British adults living in assisted accommodation completed measures of BJW-self, BJW-others, life satisfaction and intention to engage in delinquent behaviour. They also listed their personal goals and indicated their confidence that they would attain them. In partial correlation and hierarchical regression analyses, BJW-self predicted confidence in the realization of goals, but was inversely related to delinquent intentions. In contrast, BJW-others was directly related to delinquent intentions but inversely related to confidence in achieving socially legitimate personal goals. These results were not attributable to variations in life satisfaction or in the achievability of participants' goals.

Using Hierarchical Linear Modeling for Proformative Evaluation: A Case Example

Proformative evaluation—first introduced in Scriven’s (2006) The great enigma: An evaluation design puzzle—“is motivated, like formative evaluation, by the intention to improve something that is still developing, but unlike formative, the improvement is only possible by taking action, hence proactive instead of reactive, hence both, hence proformative” (M. Scriven, personal communication, March 9, 2006). An exploratory study was conducted to proformatively assess the effects of a pilot intervention intended to reduce negative attitudes toward the poor using a non-probability, convenience sample of 202 (149 women, 53 men) predominately White college students from a midsized Midwestern university. The study was conducted so that the program, prior to full-scale implementation, could be refined and more effectively designed. Hierarchical linear modeling was used to fit a two-level baseline (unconditional means) and growth model. The baseline model regressed the within individuals (nested) measures of attitudes toward the poor on time. The growth model regressed attitudes toward the poor on level two individual characteristics of gender, receipt of public assistance, race, and just-world beliefs.

Book Review Article: Challenging the Belief in a (Genetically) Just World

Challenging the Belief in a (Genetically) Just World Race Differences in Intelligence. An Evolutionary Analysis Richard Lynn Washington Summit Publishers, Augusta, Georgia, 2006. During the 1970s, the psychologist Melvin Lerner observed that people feel comfortable in the belief that the world is a just place where effort gets rewarded and vice gets punished, the rich are rich through their own merit and the poor are poor through their own fault, and where bad things never happen to good girls (Lerner, 1980). In pre-modern times, the desire to believe in a just world created the religious concept of divine justice, with rewards and punishments meted out in the afterlife. The intellectuals of the late 20th century could no longer believe in a world where everyone gets what he deserves; nor could they believe in divine justice. And so they retreated to a more defensible position: injustices and inequalities exist, but they are not inherent in nature, but are made by people; biological differences and specifically genetic differences among people do not exist for those abilities that are important for success in life, nor do they exist among races, all we have to do to ensure equal outcomes for everyone is to provide equal opportunity for everyone. The first part of this belief system, that there are no genetic ability differences among individuals, has been dismantled by the findings of behavioral genetics in the course of the past 40 years. Since the 1980s the evidence for a fairly strong genetic contribution to individual differences in intelligence and personality has been too overwhelming to be ignored by even the staunchest believers in the genetically just world. The question of race differences is far less settled in the scientific arena. This is because the quasi-experimental designs and statistical methods for partitioning the variance between genetic and environmental effects are not applicable to group differences. The topic is also under a stronger taboo than individual differences, and is therefore avoided by careerconscious academics to the present day. Richard Lynn's book Race Differences in Intelligence is one of the rare scientific treatments of this contentious issue. 149 of the book's 244 pages are devoted to a detailed compilation of IQ test results from virtually all regions of the world, from the Kalahari Desert to the Arctic. This is very different from much of the older literature on race differences, which was based on studies in the United States. The advantage of Lynn's approach is that worldwide patterns cannot be explained away by factors that are specific to a single country. Its disadvantage is that environmental differences between countries are so great that any inferences about genetic causes become tenuous. Borrowing from the work of the population geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza and his associates (Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman, 2003), Lynn divides the human species into 10 races whose intelligence he investigates in turn: Europeans, Africans, Bushmen and Pygmies, North Africans and South Asians, Southeast Asians, Australian Aborigines, Pacific Islanders, East Asians, Arctic peoples, and Amerindians. We learn, for example, that the average IQ is 105 for East Asians, 99 for Europeans, 91 for the Inuit and other arctic peoples, 84 for South Asians and North Africans, 67 for sub-Saharan Africans, and 54 for the Bushmen. The sheer amount of studies cited by Lynn is astonishing, and although many of them have serious limitations, the overall pattern is quite consistent. Lynn proposes that race differences in intelligence are to a large extent genetic. He attributes their evolution to two mechanisms. The first and most important mechanism is the need of people in northern latitudes to adapt to the challenges of a harsh and strongly seasonal climate, and especially the requirement for big-game hunting. The second mechanism is a shortage of IQ-boosting new mutations in small and isolated populations. …

Individual Differences and Beliefs Concerning Preference for University Assessment Methods

This paper explores the relationship between personality, IQ, gender, beliefs about intelligence, and preference for assessment methods at university in 3 separate studies. Study 1 (N= 367) examined attitudes toward examinations (ATE) and attitudes toward continuous assessment (ATCA) using specific assignments with regard to subjectively assessed intelligence (SAI), entity and incremental beliefs about intelligence (BAI), just-world beliefs, and gender. Studies 2 (N= 120) and 3 (N= 93) found significant and negative associations between neuroticism and preference for both essay-type and oral exams. IQ was positively and significantly related to preference for multiple-choice exams. Study 3 tested the relationship of preference for assessment methods with academic performance. Results indicated that preferences are associated with individual differences, rather than academic performance. Findings are discussed in terms of the advantages and disadvantages of introducing alternative methods of student assessment at the university level.

Understanding Anti-Arab Reactions Post-9/11: The Role of Threats, Social Categories, and Personal Ideologies1

This study examined social psychological processes associated with anti-Arab reactions (prejudice, stereotypes, and discrimination) following the September 11 terrorist attacks. Participants (N= 201) responded to an online survey. Perceived threats, self-categorization, social dominance orientation, and just-world beliefs were tested for their effectiveness in predicting anti-Arab reactions. The results reveal that self-categorization and social dominance orientation each individually accounted for a substantial percentage of the variance, while perceived threats accounted for a relatively small amount of the variance in anti-Arab responses. However, an integrated model demonstrated that social dominance orientation, threats, self-categorization, and a threat by self-categorization interaction provided the best prediction of anti-Arab reactions. Results are discussed in terms of the theoretical and practical applications for understanding out-group derogation following political-cultural world events.

Justice for all, or just for me? More evidence of the importance of the self-other distinction in just-world beliefs

Recent research shows that the belief that the world is fair to the self (BJW-self) is associated with indices of psychological health, whereas the belief that the world is fair to others (BJW-others) is associated with harsh social attitudes (Bègue and Bastounis, 2003). However research has not ruled out the possibility that third factors are responsible for these patterns of correlation. In the present research, 233 psychology undergraduates completed measures of BJW-self, BJW-others, attitudes to the poor, life satisfaction, locus of control, self esteem, and socially desirable responding. Results showed that BJW-self is uniquely related to psychological health, BJW-others is uniquely related to harsh attitudes to the poor, and that these relationships are not attributable to the influence of third causes. Results provide strong support for the distinction between perceived justice for the self and for others, and suggest that perceptions of justice are indeed the “active ingredient” responsible for their ability to predict psychological and social outcomes.