Just World Fallacy

What is the just-world fallacy?

The just world fallacy is the belief that the world is just and that people generally get what they deserve. This belief can lead people to blame victims for their own suffering, and to believe that they would not experience the same hardships if they were in the same situation.

The just-world hypothesis and victim blaming

The just-world account proposes that people sometimes preserve a belief in fairness by explaining suffering as deserved. It is an account of judgment, not evidence that every desire for fairness produces victim blame. For example, assuming that someone must have deserved harm simply because it happened uses the outcome as its own explanation.

Questioning a just-world assumption

Distinguish evidence of responsibility from the assumption that an outcome must be deserved. Bad things can happen to good people. To understand a particular event, examine circumstances and constraints as well as choices.

The defensive attribution hypothesis examines how explanations of harmful events can serve a self-protective role.

In Lerner and Simmons’s experiment, observers devalued an apparently suffering victim under conditions where the suffering would continue and they could not alter it. The authors interpreted this as support for a just-world explanation. The result concerns observers’ evaluations in that experiment, rather than every possible response to another person’s suffering.

Source: Observer’s reaction to the innocent victim: Compassion or rejection?.