The relation between belief in a just world and early processing of deserved and undeserved outcomes: An ERP study.

We used event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine how quickly people in general, and certain people in particular, process deservingness-relevant information. Female university students completed individual difference measures, including individual differences in the belief in a just world (BJW), a belief that people get what they deserve. They then read stories in which an outcome was deserved, undeserved, or neither deserved nor undeserved (i.

Experimental evidence of subtle victim blame in the absence of explicit blame.

We argue that people will often eschew explicit victim blame (e.g., claiming that "X is to blame") because it is counternormative and socially undesirable, yet they might still engage in subtle victim blame by attributing victims' suffering to behaviors the victims can control (i.

Compensatory rationalizations and the resolution of everyday undeserved outcomes.

People prefer to perceive the world as just; however, the everyday experience of undeserved events challenges this perception.The authors suggest that one way people rationalize these daily experiences of unfairness is by means of a compensatory bias. People make undeserved events more palatable by endorsing the notion that outcomes naturally balance out in the end--good, yet undeserved, outcomes will balance out bad outcomes, and bad undeserved outcomes will balance out good outcomes.

Experimental research on just-world theory: problems, developments, and future challenges.

M. J. Lerner (1980) proposed that people need to believe in a just world; thus, evidence that the world is not just is threatening, and people have a number of strategies for reducing such threats.

An analysis of empirical research on the scope of justice.

The scope of justice has been defined as the boundary within which justice is perceived to be relevant. The empirical literature on this topic is primarily aimed at predicting when a target will be excluded from the scope of justice and at examining potential consequences of exclusion, from accepting a target's suffering to active harm-doing such as mass internment and genocide. The concept of the scope of justice is interesting and heuristically useful, but there are several problems with the empirical literature that impede its progress.