Responses to Victimizations and Belief in a Just World (Critical Issues in Social Justice)

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The adversary professions--law, enterprise, and executive, between others--typically declare an ethical permission to violate individuals in ways in which, if now not for the pro position, will be morally flawed. Die Neuen Kriege nach Herfried Muenkler: Darstellung und kritische Analyse German Edition. Studienarbeit aus dem Jahr im Fachbereich Ethik, observe: Ethics, Moral Life and the Body: Shaw addresses the 'ethical flip' in modern sociological considering, via exploring the contribution of sociology and the social sciences to bioethical debates approximately morality and tissue trade practices.

Free Will and Action Explanation: This allows people to plan for the future and engage in effective, goal-driven behavior. Lerner summarized his findings and his theoretical work in his monograph The Belief in a Just World: Lerner hypothesized that the belief in a just world is crucially important for people to maintain for their own well-being. But people are confronted daily with evidence that the world is not just: Lerner explained that people use strategies to eliminate threats to their belief in a just world. These strategies can be rational or irrational. Rational strategies include accepting the reality of injustice, trying to prevent injustice or provide restitution, and accepting one's own limitations.

Non-rational strategies include denial , withdrawal , and reinterpretation of the event. There are a few modes of reinterpretation that could make an event fit the belief in a just world. In the case of observing the injustice of the suffering of innocent people, one major way to rearrange the cognition of an event is to interpret the victim of suffering as deserving.

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An additional effect of this thinking is that individuals experience less personal vulnerability because they do not believe they have done anything to deserve or cause negative outcomes. Many researchers have interpreted just-world beliefs as an example of causal attribution. In victim blaming, the causes of victimization are attributed to an individual rather than to a situation.

Early evidence

Thus, the consequences of belief in a just world may be related to or explained in terms of particular patterns of causal attribution. Others have suggested alternative explanations for the derogation of victims. One suggestion is that derogation effects are based on accurate judgments of a victim's character. In particular, in relation to Lerner's first studies, some have hypothesized that it would be logical for observers to derogate an individual who would allow himself to be shocked without reason. Another alternative explanation offered for the derogation of victims early in the development of the just-world hypothesis was that observers derogate victims to reduce their own feelings of guilt.

Observers may feel responsible , or guilty, for a victim's suffering if they themselves are involved in the situation or experiment. In order to reduce the guilt, they may devalue the victim. They conducted one study that found derogation of victims occurred even by observers who were not implicated in the process of the experiment and thus had no reason to feel guilty.

Alternatively, victim derogation and other strategies may only be ways to alleviate discomfort after viewing suffering. This would mean that the primary motivation is not to restore a belief in a just world, but to reduce discomfort caused by empathizing.

Studies have shown that victim derogation does not suppress subsequent helping activity and that empathizing with the victim plays a large role when assigning blame. According to Ervin Staub , [15] devaluing the victim should lead to lesser compensation if restoring belief in a just world was the primary motive; instead, there is virtually no difference in compensation amounts whether the compensation precedes or follows devaluation. Psychopathy has also been linked to the lack of just-world maintaining strategies, possibly due to dampened emotional reactions and lack of empathy.

After Lerner's first studies, other researchers replicated these findings in other settings in which individuals are victimized. This work, which began in the s and continues today, has investigated how observers react to victims of random calamities like traffic accidents, as well as rape and domestic violence , illnesses, and poverty. Observers thus maintain their belief in a just world by changing their cognitions about the victims' character.

Just-world hypothesis

In the early s, social psychologists Zick Rubin and Letitia Anne Peplau developed a measure of belief in a just world. Researchers have looked at how observers react to victims of rape and other violence. In a formative experiment on rape and belief in a just world by Linda Carli and colleagues, researchers gave two groups of subjects a narrative about interactions between a man and a woman. The description of the interaction was the same until the end; one group received a narrative that had a neutral ending and the other group received a narrative that ended with the man raping the woman.

Subjects judged the rape ending as inevitable and blamed the woman in the narrative for the rape on the basis of her behavior, but not her characteristics. Other researchers have found a similar phenomenon for judgments of battered partners. One study found that observers' labels of blame of female victims of relationship violence increase with the intimacy of the relationship.

Observers blamed the perpetrator only in the most significant case of violence, in which a male struck an acquaintance. Researchers have employed the just-world hypothesis to understand bullying.

Given other research on beliefs in a just world, it would be expected that observers would derogate and blame bullying victims, but the opposite has been found: Other researchers have found that observers judge sick people as responsible for their illnesses. One experiment showed that persons suffering from a variety of illnesses were derogated on a measure of attractiveness more than healthy individuals were. In comparison to healthy people, victim derogation was found for persons presenting with indigestion, pneumonia, and stomach cancer.

Moreover, derogation was found to be higher for those suffering from severer illnesses, except for those presenting with cancer. More recently, researchers have explored how people react to poverty through the lens of the just-world hypothesis. Strong belief in a just world is associated with blaming the poor, with weak belief in a just world associated with identifying external causes of poverty including world economic systems, war , and exploitation. Some research on belief in a just world has examined how people react when they themselves are victimized.

An early paper by Dr. Ronnie Janoff-Bulman found that rape victims often blame their own behavior, but not their own characteristics, for their victimization. These studies on victims of violence , illness , and poverty and others like them have provided consistent support for the link between observers' just-world beliefs and their tendency to blame victims for their suffering.

Subsequent work on measuring belief in a just world has focused on identifying multiple dimensions of the belief. This work has resulted in the development of new measures of just-world belief and additional research. These distinct beliefs are differentially associated with health. Researchers have used measures of belief in a just world to look at correlates of high and low levels of belief in a just world.

Limited studies have examined ideological correlates of the belief in a just world.

These studies have found sociopolitical correlates of just-world beliefs, including right-wing authoritarianism and the protestant work ethic. Studies of demographic differences, including gender and racial differences, have not shown systematic differences, but do suggest racial differences, with Black and African Americans having the lowest levels of belief in a just world.

The development of measures of just-world beliefs has also allowed researchers to assess cross-cultural differences in just-world beliefs. Much research conducted shows that beliefs in a just world are evident cross-culturally. One study tested beliefs in a just world of students in 12 countries. This study found that in countries where the majority of inhabitants are powerless, belief in a just world tends to be weaker than in other countries.

Belief in unjust world has been linked to increased self-handicapping, criminality, defensive coping, anger and perceived future risk. Springer Shop Bolero Ozon.

Responses to Victimizations and Belief in a Just World. Leo Montada , Melvin J. The preparation of this volume began with a conference held at Trier University, approximately thirty years after the publication of the first Belief in a Just World BJW manuscript.

Just-world hypothesis

The location of the conference was especially appropriate given the continued interest that the Trier faculty and students had for BJW research and theory. As several chapters in this volume document, their research together with the other contributors to this volume have added to the current sophistication and status of the BJW construct. In the s and s Melvin Lerner, together with his students and colleagues, developed his justice motive theory.

BJW theory, meanwhile in its thirties, has become very influential in social and behavioral sciences. As with every widely applied concept and theory there is a natural develop mental history that involves transformations, differentiation of facets, and efforts to identify further theoretical relationships.

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