Hear me now,
O ye bleak and unbearable world,
You're debased and debauched as can be.
The musical "Don Quixote"
Do you believe in a just world? If you do, you may say things such as “you reap what you sow,” “what goes around comes around,” or “you get what you deserve.” You might also believe in karma, reincarnation, or heaven and hell.
It’s a very different thing to believe in the ideal of a just world than to believe in a just world as a fact. Belief in a Just World (BJW) in the social sciences is the belief that the world is in fact a just world, or essentially just, and that you really do reap what you sow and get what you deserve and cheaters never prosper, hence Donald Trump's an estimable man. BJW isn't a yes/no kind of belief. People believe it to varying degrees in varying circumstances and don't have to be consistent about it.
So if you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands. In the other world, the one I live in, people develop cancers, they’re mangled in car wrecks and mass shootings, they're shot down or asphyxiated by people they paid to protect them, while others are born with severe permanent untreatable pain.
A belief that the world is just, in an unjust world, is a good example of an ideological belief that will lead to problems. See What’s an Ideology? for the epistemological context. There are a number of attractions to the belief that the world is just, and the theory of motivated cognition explains that we're able to believe things we want to believe (see "The Motivation for Conservatism").
Belief in a just world supports the belief that we can control our lives. If you're a good person you face less risk. That has the attraction of simplicity. If you're having problems, straighten up your act and your troubles will go away. You're in charge. That's pretty good, and a message that many parents are happy to pass along to their dependents. In several Christian traditions (Calvinism, "prosperity" Christianity) God is a sort of just-world machine. People who work hard prosper, preferably now but if not now, in the great by-and-by. In a not-too-subtle inversion of logic, if you prosper it's because you're good. Ask Calvin, he'll agree. The prosperous among us should like the sound of that. The powerful should like it too.
If you already have justice, there’s literally no reason to pursue it. That's handled. If another's misfortune is deserved, there's no reason for guilt, nor pity, nor help, nor indeed is there any responsibility for others' misfortunes.
So, while justice is desirable, believing that justice exists (or that it's not your concern) provides a range of benefits, practical and emotional, to the well-fed and secure, while it encourages inequality.
Belief in a just world leads to effects very much like the effects of personal attribution, a preference to attribute responsibility to people rather than to circumstances. Its advocates call it "personal responsibility." It's difficult to argue against if you put it that way. See "Attribution in Conservative Ideology." [Skitka 2002]
While I imagine that a just world would be nice, I can only imagine it. Believing that it is a fact is problematic. One of the most prominent problems is that belief in a just world leads to the blaming and derogation of people who need the benefit of your compassion. This occurs in sexual assaults, poverty, employment, and other areas. Misattribution of responsibility, like convicting an innocent person, causes at least two problems, one being that the cause is misidentified and un-addressed. The designation of victims should be a matter for inquiry, but in a just world there are no victims, which leaves us immobilized.
Maintaining BJW in a bleak and unbearable world takes a lot of energy. He who suffers may have to be maligned. If poor, he doesn't work hard enough. If ill, he ought to have better regulated his behaviors, depending on his malady. It's easy to see that the toll on the Believer could be large and the effort tiring, but the karmic balance is at stake.
And there is an alternative to that much psychic investment. Justice is a plastic concept, so just deserts can be based on behaviors or attributes or even birth. In just world ideologies the connection between actions/attributes and consequences is quite flexible. Hence it is a legitimizing myth. Strategies for maintaining motivated beliefs don't have to be rational, just passable.
The men who wrote the Christian gospels believed that demonic possession was the cause of many afflictions, mostly those with no obvious cause. Some things don't change. Those victims were cured by driving out the demon. Such a passive cure wouldn't make sense to a true BJW believer unless the sufferer's transgressions were driven out of him at the same time.
I doubt that people who believe in it invest much energy in working through the ramifications of this belief. BJW not only implies a mechanism to make sure of justice, but provides an operational definition of justice. Whatever is, is just. Adherence to BJW implies that the things that happen to people are just. BJW is more sustainable by the privileged. And BJW believers are happier than non-believers. Really. How might a true Believer react to a deadly pandemic?
"Justification" is the use of an idea to provide legitimacy or support for another idea or for a behavior. Justification has been a part of much social theorizing, including psychoanalytic theory, cognitive dissonance theory, social identity theory, and others. [Jost 1994, p. 1] In an early paper (Jost 1994) Dr. Jost theorized about the role of "system justification" in enabling or promoting racial and class stereotyping. He explains:
“System-justification refers to the psychological process whereby an individual perceives, understands, and explains an existing situation or arrangement with the result that the situation or arrangement is maintained.”
System justification is a process whereby social processes are legitimized. It can work by way of stereotypes or by other routes, e.g., through Belief in a Just World. The social processes justified can include social and economic systems, status and power hierarchies, resource distributions, social roles, etc. [Jost 1994, p. 2]
In that paper Jost proposes that system justification provids a better explanation for the phenomenon of negative self-stereotyping within non-dominant groups than do ego justification or group justification. "Ego justification" is justification in terms of self-interest. Ego justification is able to explain stereotypes that support the position or behavior of the self. "Group justification" extends that idea to the social group. [Jost 1994, p. 2]
Documented examples of ego justification include the tendency among the rich to embrace stereotypes of the poor as lazy, and the tendency of the aggressive to stereotype others as “savage,” "ignorant," or in other ways tainted. This is apparently as justification for their exploitation, as in imperial ideologies. It is evident in the attitudes of the slave exploiters in American history.
System-justification theory, however, explains such stereotypes as the attribution of role-specific traits in an ideological environment. Ego justification fails to explain negative self-stereotypes. It also fails to explain negative stereotyping toward groups with which one has limited contact or for other reasons has no motive to negatively stereotype. Also, stereotypes seem to be consensual in a way that is inconsistent with the variations in personal relationships with the targeted groups. [Jost 1994, p. 4]
Neither ego-justification nor group-justification explain victim-blaming. [Jost 1994, p. 14]
In general it is believed that groups tend to have stereotypes which enhance their group and disenhance other groups. Group justification fails to explain why disadvantaged groups may accept negative stereotypes of themselves. Group locus of stereotypical beliefs helps explain their consensual nature. If stereotypes emerge from the group, they may become group norms. [Jost 1994, p. 6]
Jost says that "individuals generate beliefs about themselves and stereotypes about social groups in such a way that existing systems are justified.” (The traditional story, “How the elephant got his trunk,” begins with the established fact of the elephant's long trunk. It must have gotten that long somehow, so the tale is contrived that an elephant long ago had his snout stretched by a crocodile, and to this very day, elephants have long trunks. That's how I think about justification myths.) Evidence shows that system justification occurs subconsciously, implying that ideology may also be exercised subconsciously. [Jost 1994, p. 3] He adds that “arrangements tend to be explained and justified just because they exist.” Existing systems are seen as natural. Separation of people into classes leads to justification of the classes. [Jost 1994, p. 11]
The definition almost describes the process. (This is my assertion, not Jost's.) In order to participate in a social system, you must first see and understand it as it is meant to function. You spend your childhood engaged in coming to that kind of understanding of your world. This perception or understanding has an automatic priority over understandings that might see the arrangements in another way through a different lens.
“...people will often make sense of existing states of affairs by assigning attributes to the self and others that are consistent with the roles or positions occupied by individuals and groups.” [Jost 1994, p. 20] The Stanford experiments, in which student volunteers easily assumed the roles of submissive prison inmates and dominating prison guards, confirms this.
An experiment performed in the 1970s put people at random into either the role of questioner or contestant in a Jeopardy-like game. People attributed more knowledge to questioners than to contestants, even themselves, although the assignment of roles was understood to be random. Those experimenters noted:
People are apt to underestimate the extent to which seemingly positive attributes of the powerful simply reflect the advantages of [being in] social control.
Jost et al. remark:
The result, of course, is that the powerful are stereotyped, even by the powerless, in such a way that their success is explained or justified; meanwhile, the powerless are stereotyped (and self-stereotyped) in such a way that their plight is well-deserved and similarly justified. The process may be self-perpetuating in that people who are stereotyped tend to choose social roles for themselves that are consistent with the stereotypic expectations others have of them. [Jost 1994, p. 13]
And we do often follow the path of least resistance.
Cognitive conservatism is “a disposition to preserve existing systems of knowledge and beliefs at the cost of accuracy in information processing” by “selectively attending to or generating attitude-consistent information and by mis-remembering past experiences.” That's a mouthful. There is also evidence for a status-quo effect, by which people prefer the status quo despite otherwise more-desirable alternatives. The existence of these two effects increases the motivation to system justification. The existence of ideological justification, in addition, eases system justification. [Jost 1994, p. 14]
Stereotypes can serve system-justification functions. Jost says that "people imbue social regularities with an 'ought' quality," which certainly agrees with my experience. System justification has much in common with Social Dominance Theory’s ‘legitimizing myths.’ That is, stereotypes function as legitimizing myths. [Jost 1994, p. 10] Stereotypes are essentially social ideas. They exist when they are accepted by enough people.
The contents of stereotypes may be determined more by social arrangements than by a ‘kernel of truth.’ This is consistent with some research, including Susan Fiske’s “Envy Up, Scorn Down” and the research of Duckitt et al., “A Causal Chain for Conservatism?” It is possible for favorable stereotypes to nevertheless encourage disadvantageous inequality, as is argued concerning female roles in our society. [Jost 1994, p. 17]
At the same time that system justification dampens change, it can victimize.
The term “false consciousness” refers to the holding of beliefs that are contrary to one’s personal or group interests. (The consciousness is "false" in that it's untrue to group interests. That's the Marxist influence.) It can be fed by system justification. Such beliefs can support existing disadvantageous conditions. [Jost 1994, p. 3]
Research on gender roles has shown that “gender roles both reflect and reproduce the division of social roles.” [Jost 1994, p. 13]
Just world beliefs can cause people to blame themselves for their status as victims.
Stereotyping also has a cognitive explanation, which centers on abstraction and generalization. [Jost 1994, p. 2] This cognitive explanation can explain negative stereotypes only if they reflect reality.
Social reality has an advantage over imagination in beliefs formed through justification processes. We are known, for example, to infer attributes from position. Since stereotyping occurs unconsciously it is likely that stereotypes can affect their targets unconsciously. [Jost 1994, p. 15] System justification may be promoted by a lack of skepticism or consciousness about the political and economic context, or by lack of a similarly-affected group. These effects help explain why stereotypes can be maintained despite harm to the disadvantaged group.
While Jost's 1994 paper argues for system justification as a source for stereotyped views of social classes and roles, there is no obvious reason to think that the process applies only to people. It could as well apply to our understanding of systems, procedures, institutions, and so forth. After all, we model and understand countless things by anthropomorphizing them.
Next: Attribution in Conservative Ideology
More information:
[Jost 1994] “The role of stereotyping in system-justification and the production of false consciousness,” Jost, John T., and Banaji, Mahzarin R., “British Journal of Social Psychology,” Vol. 33, 1994.
Wikipedia: Just-world hypothesis.
Living in a conservative world
© 2021, Ross A. Hangartner