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Imagine you’re playing a round of the classic game Monopoly, except the game is rigged in your favor. While you start with $2,000, your opponent begins with just $1,000. When you pass Go on the board, you collect $200, while your partner gains just $100. To top it all off, you are given two dice to roll each turn, when your opponent is restricted to rolling just one.
Envision that after 15 minutes of inevitable success, you’re asked why you were able to do so much better than your opponent. How would you respond?
Social Psychologists have studied a worldview common to many people known as the Just-World Fallacy (also known as the Just-World Phenomenon, Mechanism Hypothesis, or Belief). This is the idea that those who are on top of the social ladder, those with money, power, and influence, believe the world is just.
Those in the middle think the world is somewhat just, and those at the bottom believe the world is unjust. Experiments have shown that adults are likely to assume that fortunate people are good and unfortunate people are relatively bad.
There are subtle messages all around us that reinforce the idea that the world is just. I recently saw a home décor sign that stated, “You get what you work for.” Cues of meritocracy are abundant, ranging from children’s stories such as The Little Engine That Could to advertisements and slogans such as Nike’s "Just do it.” While I was growing up in a religious household, explanations of God’s blessings for the righteous and punishment for the wicked were often used to help us make sense of accidents, illnesses, and natural disasters.
When Paul Piff and his team carried out the Monopoly experiment, described above, they noticed several interesting things as the game progressed. The rich players, as determined by a coin flip, began to move their piece around the board louder, forcefully hitting the piece against the board to move to their destination. Rich players ate more pretzels. They became less sensitive to their opponent and more demonstrative of their success. Piff states,
Here's what I think was really, really interesting: it's that, at the end of the 15 minutes, we asked the players to talk about their experience during the game. And when the rich players talked about why they had inevitably won in this rigged game of Monopoly, they talked about what they'd done to buy those different properties and earn their success in the game. And they became far less attuned to all those different features of the situation—including that flip of a coin—that had randomly gotten them into that privileged position in the first place. And that's a really, really incredible insight into how the mind makes sense of advantage.
This experiment gives a clear example of participants explaining their own good fortune as earned and deserved, while simultaneously justifying the misfortunate of their opponent.
Assuming the world is just can destroy compassion in a handful of ways.
If the world is just, inequality is justified. One study surveyed participants on a scale measuring justification of inequality, using items such as, “It is impossible to offer everybody the same chances, because inequality does exist among human beings and, thus, is unavoidable.” Researchers found belief in a just world was positively correlated with the justification of inequality.
The Just-World Phenomenon is associated with religiosity, conservatism, and negative attitudes toward underprivileged groups. This may help explain differences in social policy preferences between Democrats and Republicans. In a survey by Pew Research Center, participants were asked why a person is rich or poor. Results found 66% of Republicans said a person is rich because they worked harder, whereas 60% of Democrats said that it was because they had advantages in life. On why a person is poor, 56% of Republicans attributed it to a lack of effort, whereas 71% of Democrats said it was because of circumstances beyond control.
If the world is just, victims share blame in their circumstances. One German civilian, while visiting the Bergen-Belsen concentration camps shortly after World War II, said, “What terrible criminals these prisoners must have been to receive such treatment” (p. 503). One of the classic examples of victim-blaming is in the case of rape. Researchers found that those who believe the world is just were also more likely to agree with statements such as “Many rapes happen because women lead men on” or “When women talk and act sexy, they are inviting rape.”
If the world is just, other possible explanations of misfortune are disregarded. When we assume that the world is just, we ignore other important factors that may help explain why someone is in an unfortunate circumstance. This was demonstrated nicely by Jeanne Ellis Ormrod, who stated:
I recall a conversation I once had with a well-educated man whose training was in mechanical engineering rather than psychology or education. We were discussing the fact that, on average, children in inner-city schools achieve at lower levels than children in suburban schools. Knowing that I was an educational psychologist, the man asked why I thought there was such a difference in performance levels. I said that there were apt to be a number of reasons, probably including smaller school budgets, larger class sizes, more obligations and fewer resources at home, poor nutrition and health care, fear of personal safety, and a higher proportion of children with learning disabilities and other special needs. The man seemed quite surprised. “I always thought the kids just weren’t motivated,” he said. (p. 481)
The man attributed all of the students’ outcomes to a single factor that justified their poor academic achievements. He assumed that if students are doing bad in school, they must have done something to deserve it.
There is some adaptive value in believing the world is just. Researchers investigating the role of the Just-World Phenomenon in the context of rape said, “Generally, holding a JWB [Just World Belief] allows people to feel a sense of safety, as they have control over their own actions/behavior. This in turn makes the world around them a predictable, manageable, and safe place.” However, it can also contribute to the decay of compassion. Compassion is cultivated when we stop making assumptions about who is worthy of it and who is not. Overcoming the Just-World Fallacy can begin when we recognize our own unearned privileges, practice gratitude, and foster empathy.
