This column will change your life: the just world bias | Life and style | The Guardian

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Life, as you may have had cause to remind your three-year-old recently, isn't fair. This is one of those truths that, beyond toddlerhood, we all like to think we understand. Furthermore, most of us agree that making life fairer would be a good thing, which is why politicians reach for the term "fairness" in even the most questionable contexts. (Nick Clegg, for one, appears to be conducting a vigorous extramarital affair with the word.) Thanks to Occupy Wall Street, and the protests it has spawned, fairness has rarely been such big news. But the Occupy protesters may face an even tougher struggle than they realise, because deep down, and whatever our political opinions, many of us seem to believe that life is fair – that by and large people get what they deserve. This annoying but by now well-substantiated finding is known as the "just world hypothesis", and the most famous demonstration of it was a series of clever experiments by the psychologist Melvin Lerner. In one, he showed people what appeared to be live footage of a woman receiving painful electric shocks for making errors in a memory test. (She was actually his accomplice.) Some groups of viewers had the option of ending her ordeal; others didn't. The latter – forced to watch suffering with no chance of relieving it – formed far lower opinions of the woman, seemingly to "bring about a more appropriate fit between her fate and her character". Those opinions were worst when they were told the woman got no financial reward for her pains. The greater the injustice, the more people appeared to need to believe the victim brought it on herself. What's going on here, it's suggested, is a quest for a feeling of security. The suggestion that victims of rape were "asking for it" is a case in point: if you can convince yourself that victims deserve to be victimised, you don't need to fear that you and yours – who don't deserve it, and would never ask for it – might have to endure the same fate. In a sense, it's the opposite of the "Ben Franklin effect", mentioned here before, which states that if you want to get someone to like you, you should ask him or her to do you a favour: to eliminate cognitive dissonance, the favour-doer will come to think of the favour-receiver as likable, since likable people are the kind for whom he or she does favours. The just world hypothesis sees suffering and concludes that people who suffer must be the kind of people we disdain. In nastier corners of the positive-thinking world, this bias is explicit: victims of crime and even of genocides, certain dodgy gurus have said, must have caused their own victimhood. That's easily rejected. The more troubling thought is that the bias might influence us unawares: while consciously feeling bad for the less fortunate, are you subconsciously seeking to rationalise their fate? Maybe this also explains some people's tendency to blame themselves for all that befalls them, even though that redoubles their misery. At least "I'm a terrible person" makes for a coherent explanation; "I'm a good person, but life is randomly cruel" is much scarier. But it's truer. To quote that famously perceptive life-coach Clint Eastwood, as William Munny in Unforgiven, "Deserve's got nothing to do with it."

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Why I think people should be slammed with charts about life outcomes and take some kind of course in statistics.

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I have always wondered why this view is so common. Nearly everyone, over the age of three, has seen that the world is not "fair" in the three year old's black and white sense. So why the disconnect?
Simple really, the entire system of human affairs relies on the majority accepting, at a fundamental level, the "Just World Hypothesis". Without it the system breaks.
If people don't accept that the rich and powerful are rich and powerful because they "deserve" it, or conversely, that the poor and unfortunates are so because they also somehow "deserve" it, the system would blow up.
Imagine what would happen if everybody realized:
1) that the World is NOT fair,
2) the World is not unfair either,
3) the World is simply what it is.
There is not enough rope or lamp posts for the resulting fall out.
F

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"Patriotism means being loyal to your country all the time and to its government when it deserves it."-- Mark Twain

"Inter arma silent Musae"--when the weapons speak, the muses fall silent.

An't nanum hearm deth, doth hwaet ye willath.

It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished
unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets. -Voltaire

Economic Left/Right: -3.88
Authoritarian/Libertarian: -4.36

Well, it;s true that the Calvinist worldview propagates this idea, but I think its more fudmantally rooted in our psychology. Perhaps, in a primitive paleolithic society, it more or less "works", inasmuch as someone who has been say exiled by the tribe probably deserves it and so on. It may also be related to learning from the observation of others. At any rate, I don't think it's new or specific to our society, becuase itr must surely have been applicable to slave and serf societies too. It might, arguably, be social in the sense of being a response to our long history of class divided societies, in that self-regard works for the ruling class and obeisance and submission can work for the ruled class.

I think it goes deeper still.

Religions and beliefs in gods, spirits, spirituality and eastern esoteric stuff ("things happen for a reason etc") are also based on the same idea - "this world only looks like it's random but, really, it's benevolent/fair". See "The Alchemist" by Paulo Coehlo for a poetic variation on this.

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Yes I mostly agree, in that inventing magical causes for observable effects makes them knowable and to an extent controllable, as per the OP. Our wickedness has caused god to punish us and we can address that by flagellating ourselves, etc. I'm just wary of projecting things from history into prehistory; from what little we know about really old religious ideas, it's not necessarily safe to assume that there was a belief in justice or morality and so on.