The just-world fallacy, also called the just-world hypothesis, is the tendency to believe that the world is fundamentally fair, so that people generally get what they deserve and deserve what they get. The concept was developed by the social psychologist Melvin Lerner in the 1960s, whose experiments found that observers of an apparently innocent victim's suffering would often derogate or blame the victim in order to preserve the belief that bad things do not happen to good people without reason. The fallacy has been used to explain victim blaming in contexts such as poverty, illness and sexual assault, and Lerner argued that belief in a just world serves a psychological function by making an unpredictable world feel more orderly and controllable.
Facts
Core ClaimLerner traced the belief to a functional need: holding that the world is just lets a person believe their own actions predictably shape their own outcomes, which is also why observers often blame a victim for their own suffering rather than accept that misfortune can be arbitrary. 1 First Described Year Classification
Type of Phenomenon Connections
Associated With
Developed the just-world hypothesis in the 1960s, arguing belief in a just world helps people experience an unpredictable world as orderly and controllable.
In Branch
Source Wikipedia: Just-world fallacy
Source Wikipedia: Just-world fallacy
Sources
1. Wikipedia: Just-world fallacy
Wikimedia Foundationlead paragraph, definition
The just-world fallacy, or just-world hypothesis, is the cognitive bias that assumes that "people get what they deserve", that actions will necessarily have morally fair and fitting consequences for the actor.
lead section, defining sentence
The just-world fallacy, or just-world hypothesis, is the cognitive bias that assumes that "people get what they deserve", that actions will necessarily have morally fair and fitting consequences for the actor.
origin/history passage
In 1966, Lerner and his colleagues began a series of experiments that used shock paradigms to investigate observer responses to victimization.
lead section, phenomenon-kind classification
The just-world fallacy, or just-world hypothesis, is the cognitive bias that assumes that "people get what they deserve", that actions will necessarily have morally fair and fitting consequences for the actor.
In Branch: Cognitive Psychology, Categories
Wikipedia article 'Just-world fallacy' is filed under Category:Cognitive biases.
In Branch: Moral Psychology, Categories
Wikipedia article 'Just-world fallacy' is filed under Category:Moral psychology.
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