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.
I was in distress: my world-view at the time was implicitly built around justice, and it could not account for what was happening.
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.
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're tools, constructs and behaviours, and, on their own, without context, they are meaningless. This is harder to formulate that I expected.
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.
I now also find it easier to sympathize with both "perpetrators" of injustice, as well as with "victims" of injustice. Before, I sympathized more with the victims, and tended to dismiss the aggressors. Now, I don't feel like there's a qualitative difference between the two, to put it harshly.
I'm not sure what to make of this yet. My new, "selfish" 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't identify with "victims" anymore, I have to build up another foundation for cooperative behaviour.
“All right," said Susan. "I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need... fantasies to make life bearable."
REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.
"Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—"
YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.
"So we can believe the big ones?"
YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.
"They're not the same at all!"
YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME...SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.
"Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the point—"
MY POINT EXACTLY.”
― Terry Pratchett, Hogfather
GNU Terry Pratchett
You're not necessarily more selfish just because you're not trying to 'care' about everything so much anymore, you're just being more rational. You focus your sympathy/compassion and care on those they can affect, where you can apply understanding and judgement.
Justice is not moral. Understanding is moral, IMO.
"Now, I don't feel like there's a qualitative difference between the two, to put it harshly."
There isnt. I'm cool with psychopathic killers and rapists being locked up indefinitely and/or killed by the state on my behalf. In reality, we have not fully considered the drivers of their behavior nor tailored the response to be compassionate of their circumstances.
Are they mentally ill? Did they grow up in an orphanage where they were abused and humiliated daily by the other kids and staff?
We don't have time for such questions and considerations because we have to get them off the street.
We tell ourselves it is justice because the truth takes far too many resources to fully reconcile.
Consent (inaction) of the governed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis
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.
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
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.
I'm not sure that "fallacy" is the right word, there. A fallacy is an error of reasoning; BJW is simply a belief, it's not usually derived from reasoning. In fact I suspect it's deeper than even beliefs; my guess is that people don't know they believe in a just world.
So I don't think people "believe in" a just world; rather, their behaviour, including the things they say they believe, are the manifestation of their personality. I suspect people that find the world scary and dangerous are more inclined to believe in "pie in the sky when you die". Finding the world scary and dangerous is a personality type, not a belief system.
Yikes. I can see how that can lead to social issues when a large portion of the "haves" believe in this just-world hypothesis.
Is there any data/research that quantifies this belief in different countries/cultures?
A good video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTDGdKaMDhQ , or even a longer documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1MqJPHxy6g
The Mechanical Turk folks are the new sociology students. This study has 100% chance of not being reproducible or statistically representative.
> 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
So, just world people are 13% more honest than the general population? How can you name the title then "General Belief in a Just World Is Positively Associated with Dishonest Behavior" when clearly, everybody is dishonest and these bunch were actually... less so?
> Given that general BJW was found to be linked to antisocial tendencies, we expected stronger general BJW to be linked to more dishonesty.
I postulate academia strongly correlates with dishonesty.
The participants all had varying degrees of belief in a just world which were measured with a six-item test. The results of that test correlated significantly with the chance of a favourable self-reported coin toss.
It is meaningless to draw inferences from comparisons to another study, as they were selected differently so there's no control, and it isn't necessary as this study contains a random and varied sample of participants.
Yes, there is a question over the representativeness of Mechanical Turk workers. But even though they're surely different on average from the average human, this study is controlled by comparing them to each other rather than to some pre-determined statistics, so the sampling bias should be largely cancelled out, barring second-order interactions.
There are more fundamental issues. Having run several studies either with MTurk or panel providers who use MTurk to source some/most of their respondents, I have trouble trusting any study with an MTurk sample that doesn't explicitly show 1. how they verified respondent location and demographics and 2. how they controlled for bots and mindless click-throughs.
Even though they used a convenience sample, issues like reading comprehension (which you can get from non-native English speakers VPN'ing through a US-based IP) and participants trying to get through the study as quickly as possible - or automating their responses altogether - absolutely matter.
This... is a horrifically bad take on the study.
> So, just world people are 13% more honest than the general population? How can you name the title then "General Belief in a Just World Is Positively Associated with Dishonest Behavior" when clearly, everybody is dishonest and these bunch were actually... less so?
What!?
How can you arbitrarily compare another study that used a different experimental design to this one? Just pick out two percentages that are totally unrelated, subtract them, and then complain about something?
This is like saying, 30% of bananas in my house are bad. 42% of cars on my street are red. Why do I have this huge 12% gap between the two!? What nonsense.
> I postulate academia strongly correlates with dishonesty.
I postulate that reading comprehension is important! And that maybe, if you don't know what you're talking about, you shouldn't dump on people's work?
That being said. There are issues with this study. In addition to MTurk being noisy, the primary problem is that the effect size is very small! The authors deftly hide this in the standard way by not plotting the raw data (likelihood of cheating vs belief in a just world), which would show a very small difference. This is yet again a case of "we found a statistically significant but likely meaningless and unlikely to be replicated difference".
Yet another datapoint to suggest the gp post that academia strongly correlates with dishonesty.
There's no dishonesty here!
They are reporting data to the standard of their community. We need to raise the level of rigor and convince people to drop the entire concept of statistically significant as meaning anything at all. This all taking far too long unfortunately.
Statisticians made a terrible terrible mistake that doomed science to this bullshit for nearly a century now. People like Pearson and Fisher had good intentions, but the language they used for their methods makes them sound too attractive. So people interpret their methods to be something they are not. We need an overhaul of teaching throughout statistics to excise this cancer now, and that's going to just be very slow.
So no. Authors are doing what they were taught, what is likely best practices in their textbook. It's just that the textbook has been wrong for far too long.
Or rather, don't, because the two studies clearly are comparable. The point of science, whether social or otherwise, is to tell us true things about the world. If the response to comparing the results of two very similar studies is "you can't do that" then this research effort isn't producing generalizable knowledge, which makes it worthless.
Tell me how you have a just world for everyone?
I don't think that's true. It's sometimes taken to include retribution; but a lot (most?) justice is about reverting the consequences of "wrong" actions - inadvertent or deliberate. So the victim of a wrong action is restored to the position they would be in if the action had not been taken.
I see retribution as distinct from justice; in addition to putting things right again, "We are now going to visit on you the Universe's retribution for your moral turpitude". Bzzzt.
Or don’t trust anyone who believes in a utopian world…
Edit: For example, here are some weird correlations of no real significance-- https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
General BJW: 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.
Personal BJW: 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.
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
The unexpected result was that people with high personal BJW weren't significantly more just than people with no/or little such belief.
People with higher general BJW expectedly have it easier to justify their own dishonest behavior (e.g. "it doesn't matter what I do now justice will be served in the great scheme of things").
Others here seem to think all just world believers are likely to be dishonest.
Just because you think the world is unjust doesn't mean you are likely to be honest.
What matters is what you think about others. Do you think other people are living in a just world? e.g. do you think homeless people are mostly drug addicts? If you do then it is very likely you are a dishonest person.
1. That justice will eventually happen.
2. That justice has already happened, and what you're looking at that looks like injustice to you actually isn't.
I think everyone falls between those two extremes in practice.
An inability to even empathise is generally indicated as tending towards sociopathy.
"Karma" just means action; supposedly, actions sow seeds that have consequences. Those consequences may materialise in this life, or not. Only the most consequential actions plant seeds that endure into the next life.
Karma teachings aren't really Buddhist; the Buddha just taught what was the common belief system in his time. Karma comes from the Vedas.
> How will that make you more dishonest?
I don't think belief in karma makes you less harsh to others. I think it leads to a sort of tokenism: "I've done my kind act for today". And I think it leads to a sort of devil-take-the-hindmost attitude to people who are suffering: they are "working out their karma", i.e. their suffering is actually good for them.
How do you tell anyway that people believe in a just world? I didn't follow that in the document. Do you assign believe in a just world to people'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't be dishonest, they're talking about honesty all the time!
Edit: drinking game: drink every time I use the word always. I guess that's how frustrating I find this field. sigh
Maybe the Just World was just rewarding people who believed in the Just World by granting them the desired coin flip?
It is clearly smart to use the BJW designation instead, to avoid being pilloried.
I find this interesting though if I thought it was true.
