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The just world hypothesis describes the phenomenon that people believe that the world is one in which actions have appropriate and predictable consequences. This phenomenon has been widely studied by social psychologists since Melvin J. Lerner conducted seminal work on the belief in a just world in the early 1960s. Since that time, research has continued, examining the predictive capacity of the hypothesis in various situations and across cultures, and clarifying and expanding the theoretical understandings of just world beliefs.

Emergence
The phenomenon of belief in a just world has been observed and considered by many philosophers and social theorists. Psychologist Melvin Lerner's work made the just world hypothesis a focus of social psychological research.

Melvin Lerner
Melvin Lerner was prompted to study justice beliefs and the just world hypothesis in the context of social psychological inquiry into negative social and societal interactions. Lerner saw his work as extending Stanley Milgram's work on obedience. He sought to answer the questions of how regimes that cause cruelty and suffering maintain popular support, and how people come to accept social norms and laws that produce misery and suffering.

Lerner's inquiry was influenced by repeatedly witnessing the tendency of an observer to blame victims for their suffering. During his clinical training as a psychologist, he observed treatment of mentally ill by the health care practitioners with whom he worked. Though he knew them to be kindhearted, educated people, they blamed patients for their own suffering. He also describes his surprise at hearing his students derogate the poor, seemingly oblivious to the structural forces that contributed to poverty. In a study he was doing on rewards, he observed that when two men who were rewarded for a task were evaluated by observers, evaluations were always more positive for the one who had been accidentally rewarded. Existing social psychological theories, including cognitive dissonance, could not fully explain these phenomena. The desire to understand the processes that caused these observed phenomena led Lerner to conduct his first experiments on what is now called the just world hypothesis.

Early Evidence
In 1966, Lerner and his colleagues began a series of experiments that used shock paradigms to investigate observer responses to victimization. In the first of these experiments conducted at the University of Kansas, 72 female subjects were made to watch a confederate receiving electrical shocks under a variety of conditions. Initially, subjects were upset by observing the apparent suffering of the confederate. However, as the suffering continued and observers remained unable to intervene, the observers began to derogate the victim. Derogation was greater when the observed suffering from shock treatments was greater. However, under conditions in which subjects were told that the victim would receive compensation for her suffering, subjects did not derogate the victim. Lerner and colleagues replicated these findings in subsequent studies, as did other researchers.

Theory
In order to explain the findings of these studies, Lerner theorized the prevalence of the belief in a just world. A just world is one in which actions and conditions have predictable, appropriate consequences. These actions and conditions are typically individuals' behaviors or attributes. The specific conditions that correspond to certain consequences are socially determined by the norms and ideologies of a society. Lerner presents the belief in a just world as functional: it maintains the idea that one can impact the world in a predictable way. This allows people to plan for the future and engage in effective, goal-driven behavior. Lerner summarized his findings and his theoretical work in the 1980 monograph The Belief in a Just World: A Fundamental Delusion.

Lerner hypothesized that the belief in a just world is crucially important for people to maintain for their own well-being. However, people are confronted daily with evidence that the world is not just: people suffer without apparent cause. Lerner explained that people employ tactics to eliminate threats to the belief in a just world. These tactics can be rational or irrational. Rational tactics include accepting the reality of injustice, trying to prevent injustice or provide restitution, and accepting one's own limitations. Non-rational strategies include denial or withdrawal, and reinterpretation of the event.

There are a few ways of reinterpretation that would construe an event to fit the belief in a just world. One can reinterpret the outcome, the cause, and/or the character of the victim. In the case of observing the injustice of the suffering of innocent others, one major way to rearrange the cognition of an event is to interpret the victim of suffering as deserving of that suffering. Specifically, observers can blame victims for their suffering on the basis of their behaviors and/or their characteristics. This would result in observers both derogating victims and blaming victims for their own suffering. Much psychological research on the belief in a just world has focused on this phenomenon of victim blaming and derogation.

An additional effect of this thinking is that people feel less personally vulnerable, because they have not done anything to deserve negative outcomes. This is related to the self-serving bias observed by social psychologists.

Many researchers have interpreted just world beliefs as an example of causal attribution. In victim blaming, the causes of victimization are attributed to an individual rather than a situation. Thus, the consequences of belief in a just world may be related to or explained in terms of particular patterns of causal attribution.

Veridical judgment
Others have suggested alternative explanations for the derogation of victims. One suggestion is that derogation effects are based on accurate judgments of a victim's character. In particular, in relation to Lerner's first studies, some have hypothesized that it would be logical for observers to derogate an individual who allows herself to be shocked without justification. A subsequent study by Lerner challenged this alternative hypothesis by showing that individuals are only derogated when they actually suffer; individuals who agree to undergo suffering but do not are viewed positively.

Guilt Reduction
Another alternative explanation offered early in the development of the just world hypothesis for the derogation of victims is that observers derogate victims in order to reduce their own guilt feelings. Observers may feel responsible, or guilty, for a victim's suffering. In order to reduce the guilt, they may devalue the victim. Lerner and colleagues claim that there has not been adequate evidence for this interpretation. They conducted one study that found derogation of victims occurred even by observers who were not implicated in the process of the experiment and thus had no reason to feel guilty.

Additional Evidence
Following Lerner's first studies, other researchers replicated these findings in other settings in which individuals are victimized. This work, which began in the 1970s and continues today, has investigated how observers react to victims of random calamities, like traffic accidents, as well as rape and domestic violence, illnesses, and poverty. Generally, researchers have found that observers of the suffering of innocent victims tend to both derogate victims and blame victims for their suffering. Thus, observers maintain their belief in a just world by changing their cognitions about the character of victims.

In the early 1970s, social psychologists Zick Rubin and Letitia Anne Peplau developed a measure of belief in a just world. This measure and its revised form published in 1975 allowed for the study of individual differences in just world beliefs. Much of the subsequent research on the just world hypothesis utilized these measurement scales.

Violence
Researchers have looked at how observers react to victims of rape and other violence. In a seminal experiments on rape and belief in a just world by Ronnie Janoff-Bulman and colleagues, researchers gave two groups of subjects a narrative about interactions between a man and a woman. The description of the interaction was the same until the end; one group received a narrative that had a happy ending (a marriage proposal) and the other group received a narrative that ended with the man raping the woman. Subjects judged the rape ending as inevitable and blamed the woman in the narrative for the rape on the basis of her behavior, but not her characteristics. This finding has been replicated repeatedly.

Other researchers have found a similar phenomenon for judgments of battered partners. One study found that observers' labels of blame of female victims of relationship violence increase with the intimacy of the relationship. Observers only blamed the perpetrator only in the most significant case of violence, in which a male struck an acquaintance.

Illness
Other researchers have found that observers judge sick people as responsible for their illnesses. In one experiment, researchers found that persons suffering from a variety of illnesses were derogated, relative to healthy persons, on a measure of a person's attractiveness. Victim derogation increased with increasing severity of illness, except in the case of cancer victims. Many studies have looked at derogation of AIDS victims specifically. Higher beliefs in a just world have been found to be related to greater derogation of AIDS victims.

Poverty
More recently, researchers have explored how people react to poverty through the lens of the just world hypothesis. High belief in a just world is associated with blaming the poor, and low belief in a just world is associated with identifying external causes of poverty including world economic systems, war, and exploitation.

The self as victim
Some research on belief in a just world has examined how people react when they themselves are victimized. An early paper by researcher Ronnie Janoff-Bulman found that rape victims often engage in blaming their own behaviors, but not their own characteristics, for their victimization. It was hypothesized that this may be because blaming one's own behaviors makes an event more controllable.

These studies and others like them have provided consistent support for the link between observers' just world beliefs and their tendency to blame victims for their suffering. As a result, the just world hypothesis has become widely accepted as a psychological phenomenon.

Theoretical refinement
Subsequent work on measuring belief in a just world has focused on identifying multiple dimensions of the belief. These include belief in an unjust world, beliefs in immanent justice and ultimate justice , hope for justice, and belief in one's ability to reduce injustices. Other work has focused on looking at the different domains in which the belief may function; individuals may have different just world beliefs for the personal domain, the sociopolitical domain, the social domain, etc. . This work has resulted in the development of additional measures of just world belief and additional research.

Correlates
Researchers have used measures of belief in a just world to look at correlates of high and low levels of belief in a just world.

Limited studies have examined ideological correlates of the belief in a just world. These studies have found sociopolitical correlates of just world beliefs, including right-wing authoritarianism and the protestant work ethic. Studies have also found belief in a just world to be correlated with aspects of religiousness.

Studies of demographic differences, including gender and racial differences, have not shown systematic differences, but do suggest racial differences, with Black and African Americans having the lowest levels of belief in a just world.

The development of measures of just world beliefs also allowed researchers to assess cross-cultural differences in just world beliefs. Much research has occurred in many countries that shows that beliefs in a just world are evident cross-culturally. One study tested beliefs in a just world of students in 12 countries. This found that in countries where the majority of inhabitants are powerless, belief in a just world tends to be weaker than in other countries. This supports the theory of the just world hypothesis because the powerless have had more personal and societal experiences that have provided evidence that the world is not just and predictable.

Positive health effects
Though much of the initial work on belief in a just world focused on the negative social effects of this belief, other research on belief in a just world suggests that belief in a just world is good, and even necessary, for the mental health of individuals,ref>Dalbert, C. (2001). The justice motive as a personal resource: dealing with challenges and critical life events. New York: Plenum. . Belief in a just world is associated with greater life satisfaction and well-being and less depressive affect. Researchers are actively exploring reasons that belief in a just world might have these relationships to mental health; it has been suggested that such beliefs could be a personal resource or coping strategy that buffers stress associated with daily life and with traumatic events.

Correlational studies also showed that beliefs in a just world are correlated with internal locus of control. Strong beliefs in a just world are associated with greater acceptance of and less satisfaction with negative outcomes in life. This may one pathway through which belief in a just world affects mental health. Others have suggested that this relationship only holds for beliefs in a just world that apply to the self. Beliefs in a just world that apply to others are related instead to the victim blaming and derogation observed in other studies.

International research
Over forty years after Lerner's seminal work on belief in a just world, researchers continue to study the phenomenon. Work continues in the United States, Europe, Australia, and Asia. Researchers in Germany have contributed disproportionately to recent research. Their work resulted in a volume edited by Lerner and a German researcher entitled Responses to Victimizations and Belief in a Just world.