Nov 15, 2025

PSY 101      Class 34: Social Psychology IV: The Just World Phenomenon

Prejudice as a Social Attitude

Prejudice: A negative attitude against members of a group

• In his groundbreaking 1954 book, The Nature of Prejudice, Harvard psychologist Gordon Allport argued: Prejudice = "antipathy based on a faulty & inflexible generalization" [antipathy = a deep-seated feeling of dislike or hostility]
• Faulty means it is based on error, lack of facts, rumor, incorrect conclusions
• Inflexible means it is very difficult to change
• Generalization means it extends to most or all members of the group

Discrimination: Behaving differently (often unfairly) toward members of a group.

The "Just World" Phenomenon

1. Story of the Woman and the Ferry

• Listen to the story
• Evaluate the responsibility for the woman's death using this schematic (most responsible = 1st; 2nd most responsible = 2nd; etc.)
  

Character	Responsibility 1st...2nd...3rd..
Husband
Wife
Lover 1
Lover 2
Ferry Boat Captain
Thief

2. The Just-World Phenomenon (notes & quotations below all taken from Andre & Velasquez, 1990)

 = a powerful tendency many people have to believe that "the world is an orderly, predictable, & just place and that people get what they deserve" ("What goes around, comes around"; "Karma is a bitch"; "You get what you deserve")

• Belief in a Just World (BJW): "“The just world hypothesis (also referred to as“the belief in a just world”or BJW) states that (a) individuals need to believe in a world where people generally get what they deserve; (b) this belief enables them to confront the world as if it were a stable and orderly place; and (c) because this belief serves such an adaptive function, contrary evidence is highly disruptive, and therefore people are highly motivated to take measures to ensure that their belief is maintained” (Bartholomaeus et al., 2019)

• Melvin Lerner's research in the early 1960s at the University of Waterloo (Canada) suggests 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" (Wenzel et al., 2017, p. 2)
  
• For many people, "beneficiaries deserve their benefits and victims their suffering"
• For example, students believe that a student who won a cash lottery prize actually worked a harder than a student who didn't.
• For example: students viewing videotapes which seem to show someone being shocked in a "learning experiment" had a lower opinion of that person if he/she had no way of ending or relieving the shock.

• In 1970s Zick Rubin (Harvard) found that Just-World beliefs were associated with
• more religious, authoritarian, & conservative beliefs
• more approval for social institutions and political leaders
• negative attitudes toward underprivileged groups, particularly the poor who are seen as the cause of their own poverty (vs. the world's economic system, war, or exploitation by others).

• Later research points to a bi-dimensional model of Just World Theory (Bartholomeus & Stelan, 2019; Begue & Bastounis, 2003) in which we can distinguish
  
  
• (1) a belief in a just world as applied to ourselves individually (BJW-Self) and
  
• (2) a belief in a just world applied to what happens to others or in general (BJW-General).
  

• Strong BJW-self appears to be significantly related to a sense of personal well-being, an ability to cope in an adaptive fashion to disasters or other significant negative experiences in life, and a positives sense of the future for what you can achieve (Bartholomeus et al. 2019). 

Do you believe in a "just world"? Take this quiz and score yourself for how many items out of 6 you agree with.

3. Application: BJW-General has been found to be strongly correlated with blaming the victim for their misfortune

• Why are people poor? sick? raped? battered?

References

Andre, C., & Velasquez, M. (1990, Spring). The just world theory. Issues in Ethics, 3(2). Markula Center for Applied Ethics: Santa Clara University. Santa Clara, CA. Retrieved 11/15/2011 from http://www.scu.edu/ethics/publications/iie/v3n2/justworld.html

Bartholomaeus, J., & Strelan, P. (2019). The adaptive, approach-oriented correlates of belief in a just world for the self: A review of the research. Personality and Individual Differences, 151. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2019.06.028

Begue, L., & Bastounis, M. (2003). Two spheres of belief in justice: Extensive support for the bidimensional model of belief in a just world. Journal of Personality, 71(3), 435-463.

Tappin, B. M., & McKay, R. T. (2016). The illusion of moral superiority. Social Psychological and Personality Science. https://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1948550616673878

Wenzel, K., Schindler, S., & Reinhard, M.-A. (2017) General belief in a just world is positively associated with dishonest behavior. Frontiers in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01770

This page was originally posted on 11/17/04