The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself

by Sean Carroll

Looking for causes and reasons is a deeply ingrained human impulse. We are pattern-recognizing creatures, quick to see faces in craters on Mars or connections between the location of Venus in the sky and the state of our love life. Not only do we seek order and causation, but we favor fairness as well. In the 1960s, psychologist Melvin Lerner proposed the “Just World Fallacy” after noticing people’s tendency to blame victims of misfortune when something went wrong. To test his idea, he and his collaborator Carolyn Simmons conducted experiments in which subjects were shown other people apparently suffering the effects of electrical shocks. Afterward, many of the subjects—who knew nothing about the people supposedly being shocked—passed harsh judgments against them, berating their character. The more violent the shocks appeared to be, the harder the subjects were on the victims.