The Psychology Behind Karmic Beliefs

We all, from time to time, do things we are not proud of.

For example, several years ago, in a parking lot somewhere California, I was getting in my car and noticed a shard of broken glass right under my left front tire. I risked severe tire damage if I left the shard there, so I kicked it out of the way, but unfortunately I kicked it too hard and it landed right under another person’s car. The shard was in too deep to move it without sliding myself under the car. So, I just hoped for the best, left the scene, and put the whole incident behind me.

Again, this was not my proudest moment.

Fast forward four months. I find myself driving down route 280, heading to a conference where I was scheduled to give a talk. Out of nowhere, I hear a loud POP followed by what feels like an earthquake shaking my car. I pull over to see what's going on, and I see that my left front tire has completely blown off, bits of it sprawled along the highway behind me. This was not good. This was going to require professionals. I was going to be late for my conference talk. At that moment, the memory of my shameful act from four months earlier came into vivid focus. “I deserve this,” I thought. My actions that day, somehow, came all the way around back to me; it's Karma.

But, did my tire really pop because I had kicked that glass shard four months earlier? Rationally, I could not accept a causal explanation of that sort. Sure, there is such a thing as the "butterfly effect," where even the tiniest event (like the flap of a butterfly's wing) can potentially cause a chain of events with enormous repercussions months, years, or centuries later. So, could my kicking of the glass shard under someone's car create a chain of events that eventually led to my tire popping? Theoretically, yes. But probabilistically, it made no sense. There was no way those two events could be causally related. Still, on an emotional level, it felt that they were.

In collaboration with Aaron Kay (a fellow Ph.D. student at Stanford at the time), we designed a series of experiments to understand the psychological processes that led me (and presumably lead other people) to establish causal associations between highly disparate events.

In one study, half of the participants experienced a “good break”—learning that as a result of their student ID number, they would be eligible to participate in a subsequent, highly sought-out study. The other half of participants experienced a “bad break” (they were told they would not be eligible for that study). Later, while completing an ostensibly unrelated questionnaire, both sets of participants were asked to remember either good or bad deeds they had done in their recent past. Participants who had experienced a bad break reported more bad deeds, while participants who experienced a good break reported more good deeds. Furthermore, these effects were more pronounced in participants who expressed a belief in a just world.

In a follow-up study, participants were once again given a fortuitous good or bad break and were later asked to remember past good or bad breaks they had recently experienced. Here, the pattern reversed: participants who experienced a good break in the experiment later remembered more bad breaks from their recent past, and participants who experienced a bad break in the experiment later remembered more good breaks from their past.

Across all of our studies, participants seemed to be motivated by a desire to “balance things out.” A bad break can be balanced out by either thinking of a bad deed we have recently done, or by thinking of many good breaks we have recently had. In either case, the bad break is balanced out.

If we commit a bad deed, we may feel motivated to either do a good deed to balance it out or to be on the lookout for (and eventually find) a bad break that we can tie back to the bad deed. For me, having my tire pop on my way to a talk was the perfect bad break to associate to my bad deed of kicking the glass shard under someone’s car: it was not only relevant to my bad deed, but it was consequential enough to make me feel like my previous bad deed had been finally "balanced out." Until such a balancing event occurs, we may be consciously or unconsciously looking for one to happen.

Conversely, when we perform a good deed, we may be waiting or hoping for a good break to come our way. When we ultimately get a good break, we can attribute it to our past good deed and feel, once again, that the world is balanced; that good actions have been rewarded.

Whether or not you believe in Karma, most of us employ psychological mechanisms to make random events in our lives feel more balanced, more justified, and more ordered.