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The Belief in a Just World: A Fundamental Delusion
The "belief in a just world" is an attempt to capmre in a phrase one of the ways, if not the way, that people come to terms with-make sense out of-find meaning in, their experiences. We do not believe that things just happen in our world; there is a pattern to events which conveys not only a sense of orderli ness or predictability, but also the compelling experience of appropriateness ex pressed in the typically implicit judgment, "Yes, that is the way it should be." There are probably many reasons why people discover or develop a view of their environment in which events occur for good, understandable reasons. One explanation is simply that this view of reality is a direct reflection of the way both the human mind and the environment are constructed. Constancies, patterns which actually do exist in the environment-out there-are perceived, represented symbolically, and retained in the mind. This approach cenainly has some validity, and would probably suffice, if it were not for that sense of "appropriateness," the pervasive affective com ponent in human experience. People have emotions and feelings, and these are especially apparent in their expectations about their their hopes, fears, disappointments, disillusionment, surprise, confidence, trust, despondency, anticipation-and certainly their sense of right, wrong, good, bad, ought, en titled, fair, deserving, just.
226 pages, Hardcover
First published September 30, 1980
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December 11, 2019
Spoiler alert: this is an academic book, social psychology, with lots of carefully constructed experiments involving mostly white college undergraduates. Hmm....
I reconnected with this book because its title had always annoyed me. I don't know many people who believe in a just world. Most people I know will admit that their lot in life has a lot to do with luck. The luck to be born white or not, in the USA or not, during a particular up or down phase of an economic cycle, in a particular cohort -- GenX, Baby Boomer, etc -- has a lot of determinative force.
This book claims that people like winners and recoil from losers. The explanation is that people want to believe they are playing a more or less fair game in life. They make up stories about these winners and losers. They could say of losers "there but for fortune go I" but often they say "wow that person screwed up his chances, and look where he's ended up".
The second, unsympathetic answer was common among test subjects. If these studies were conducted, like many social psych experiments on a particular group, ie, privileged white youth who naively believe in their world because it mostly works for them, does it follow that most people really believe in a just world? Is life really like a football game, with a level playing field and referees who enforce known rules?
The first, sympathetic answer, "there but for fortune go I" is where I stand. I have worked hard and been lucky, others have worked just as hard and failed. So my feeling is to be humble towards the less fortunate especially if I don't know their particular story, and a little more skeptical of the self made success stories that get touted around as morality tales. A lot of where you end up depends on where you started.
Perhaps the message is that you need to look at context, choices, and luck in any one person's life, to discern the real story, and keep yourself from being overly judgmental or overly adoring.
I reconnected with this book because its title had always annoyed me. I don't know many people who believe in a just world. Most people I know will admit that their lot in life has a lot to do with luck. The luck to be born white or not, in the USA or not, during a particular up or down phase of an economic cycle, in a particular cohort -- GenX, Baby Boomer, etc -- has a lot of determinative force.
This book claims that people like winners and recoil from losers. The explanation is that people want to believe they are playing a more or less fair game in life. They make up stories about these winners and losers. They could say of losers "there but for fortune go I" but often they say "wow that person screwed up his chances, and look where he's ended up".
The second, unsympathetic answer was common among test subjects. If these studies were conducted, like many social psych experiments on a particular group, ie, privileged white youth who naively believe in their world because it mostly works for them, does it follow that most people really believe in a just world? Is life really like a football game, with a level playing field and referees who enforce known rules?
The first, sympathetic answer, "there but for fortune go I" is where I stand. I have worked hard and been lucky, others have worked just as hard and failed. So my feeling is to be humble towards the less fortunate especially if I don't know their particular story, and a little more skeptical of the self made success stories that get touted around as morality tales. A lot of where you end up depends on where you started.
Perhaps the message is that you need to look at context, choices, and luck in any one person's life, to discern the real story, and keep yourself from being overly judgmental or overly adoring.
Displaying 1 of 1 review