a dark night he waits Dalton has many
shadows and even years how's that for
poetic justice
we've talked a little bit about
cognitive biases and how they can affect
our judgement in many cases when
learning about some quirky systemic
error of cognition it's natural to ask
well when is this possibly going to
affect anything that I care about
okay so human brains have a tendency to
imagine faces in random noise is that
ever going to affect my life well the
answer is probably yes it does but
sometimes when you learn the details of
a particular way that human brains go
reliably wrong you consider all of human
history leading up to the point that we
learned about it and think oh oh no so
in the 60s when psychology was getting
out of its Freud phase and into some
real science a research team led by
Melvin Lerner began measuring how people
judge each other and they noticed some
interesting trends all other things
being equal people who were awarded cash
prizes literally at random were somehow
seen as being more hard-working than
people who weren't someone whose car
caused a ton of damage in an accident
was somehow seen as being more
responsible for that accident than
someone whose car only caused a little
damage even if the situations leading up
to the accidents were exactly the same
learners theorized that the underlying
cause for this odd bias was people's
need to believe that the environment
that they live in is for the most part
just that people generally get what they
deserve to test this idea he set up an
experiment where a group of people were
shown a live feed of someone who was
part of a learning experiment where if
they got a question wrong they received
a painful electric shock one of the
groups was told that if it seemed a
little too harsh they could vote to
change the test to one where the subject
was rewarded rather than punished the
other group wasn't given any such option
they were simply told that this was the
nature of the test and that the person
would keep getting shocked for wrong
answers now if you asked those two
groups to make a guess as to the
character of the person being shocked
you wouldn't really expect any
difference right I mean having the
option to change the nature of the test
doesn't have any effect on the identical
information that they've received about
the person on the screen but weirdly
enough people who were presented with a
situation where the victim was being
punished and they had no chance to
intervene had a much lower opinion of
that person than
in the other group they're so stupid why
do they keep giving wrong answers what
an idiot
these sorts of characterizations were
significantly more likely for people who
were watching and had no easy way to
change the situation it would seem that
they were inventing some sort of
rationalization for why the test subject
deserved to be punished why they had
earned their shocks Lerner's theory has
been tested in several different ways
and they all seem consistent with the
idea that human brains have a built-in
rationalization mechanism an unconscious
process that manufactures reasons that
our environment is mostly just why the
people around us are probably getting
what they deserve even if by any measure
they really aren't it's called the just
world hypothesis or the just world
fallacy now that's kind of a misnomer
because our brains seem to be fine with
the idea that injustice exists somewhere
just not that something unjust might
happen to us that our immediate
surroundings aren't karma tastic and
again this isn't the result of somebody
being naive or stupidly optimistic this
is a totally unconscious process that
our brain to perform automatically and
it makes us irrationally inclined to
believe that if somebody's suffering
then they probably deserve it it shows
up in tons of places if people are told
that somebody has some sort of disease
like AIDS or stomach cancer then
statistically they'll have fewer nice
things to say about them if you show
someone a video of domestic abuse and
give them a reason that the assailant
might be aggressive then they'll
generally attribute the incident to that
if you don't give them any reason the
one that they most commonly come up with
is the victim probably had it coming if
you give one player a ton of extra money
to start with in monopoly when they
eventually win they won't attribute
their victory to that initial bonus
they'll also say that all of the other
players just kind of suck at monopoly
huh now just because this mechanism is
inherent and automatic doesn't mean that
it's the only thing running the show
depending on people's experiences and
conscious thoughts they can give more or
less credence to this impulse towards
believing in a karmic world and let it
play a greater or lesser role in
influencing their decisions many
psychologists believe that this is why
people who survive some tremendous
injustice like innocent survivors of a
war or a natural disaster can be so
shattered by that event it's not just
about coping with loss it's also coping
with the
impact of having that psychological
mechanism fed so much conflicting data
that it just can't support the just
world hypothesis anymore
thankfully for most of us our situation
is such that we don't usually have to
confront massive injustice in any
meaningful way we might hear about stuff
like an innocent person being shot by
the police or somebody's life being
ruined by the media for no good reason
but her brains are all too happy to leap
in and say they probably deserve it that
sort of thing would never happen to us
218 million people were adversely
affected by natural disasters last year
and almost 70,000 were killed by them
4.5 million children are going to die
before their first birthday worldwide
every year it doesn't take a lot of
imagination to understand why our brains
would work so hard to invent reasons for
us to not be terrified at the disparity
between the world as we would like it to
be and the world as it is in fact
there's some recent research that shows
that belief in a just world is good for
mental and emotional well-being that
buying into the fallacy makes it easier
to deal with stress but the only way for
us to actually approach that ideal of
justice the only way to make the world
into a place where everyone really gets
what they deserve is to artificially
impose that wherever we can and the just
world policy makes us more inclined to
convince ourselves that it's already
happening even if it isn't when we're
thinking about how to build the systems
that we use to create justice things
like laws policies and government we
should bear in mind that it's likely
we'll have to go further than we think
we do to achieve it because it might
feel good to believe that giving
somebody a thousand extra dollars at the
start of a Monopoly game isn't gonna
make a huge difference until you land on
their Park Place for the third time what
instances of the just world policy have
you experienced please leave a comment
below and let me know what you think
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