Expanding our Vocabulary - the Just World Hypothesis

Expanding our Vocabulary – The Just World Hypothesis

We often have underlying beliefs that the world is in balance, that good will be rewarded and bad will be punished.  This is pervasive in our societal outlook, but it may be a cognitive bias.

Writeup on the Just World Hypothesis - https://effectiviology.com/just-world/

Lerner’s studies https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Fh0023562

Meritocracy article - https://medium.com/@tanya_64634/meritocracy-a-prescient-warning-4b23f0bbbd3f

The Hays code - https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/what-is-the-hays-code-1934/

SNL alternate ending https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vw89o0afb2A

Quotes explained - https://quotesexplained.com/god-does-not-play-dice-albert-einstein/

Joker - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7286456

The Fundamental Attribution Error - https://beyondtheminimum.podbean.com/e/expanding-our-vocabulary-%e2%80%93-fundamental-attribution-error/

 

Connect with Tanya Hewitt on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/tanya-hewitt-55804529/

Buy her a coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/tanyah

Credits:

Adam Johns – voiceover - https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamjohns730/

Beverley McKiver – composer and player of the music Tell Me About Love - https://www.linkedin.com/in/beverleymckiver/

 

Episode Transcript

Adam Johns (00:03):
Welcome to Beyond the Minimum, where we'll be exploring the world of work. We'll be chatting about concepts, ideas and phrases, explore practices and delve into what good looks like. Work can be purposeful value lead, and more meaningful to all who interact with the workplace. This podcast is brought to you by Tanya Hewitt who lives in unceded Algonquin, Anishinaabeg territory, otherwise known as Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.

Tanya Hewitt (00:33):
At the end of summer 2022, I went to a music festival that I find very unique. It is a festival that celebrates tribute bands of bands that were very popular in previous eras. The crowd that this festival attracts is also an older crowd, which is very kind to one another, the use of lawn chairs is quite prevalent, and there's just a lot of decorum at this festival. And I really, really appreciate it. This festival had different nights for different genres of music this year, it's getting bigger and bigger, I guess as it goes along. And the last night was a heavy metal night. I am not a fan of heavy metal music, and I never was. But I decided to go for a couple of reasons, number one, to try to push myself out of my comfort zone. So that's one aspect of why I went. But secondly, it reminded me of when my children were younger, and going to Christmas

(01:41):
concerts or dance recitals, whereby classes of children would go up and present, and then get off the stagefor another class to come and present. And I noticed that there were some parents who stayed only for their child's classes presentation, and then left right after. And I thought, Well, wait a minute, this is a recital for the entire school, why wouldn't you stay to see all of the classes, even though upcoming classes don't have your child in them? Why not celebrate all of the children at the school. And it's the same with this festival. I like this festival. And I would like to support the festival, even if they present some things that I personally am not attracted to. But it is part of the festival and I believe that I should be supporting something that I would like to see continuing.

Adam Johns (02:48):
Today's episode is expanding our vocabulary.

Tanya Hewitt (02:54):
Hello, everyone. Today's expanded vocabulary is the just world hypothesis. This one is a difficult one, even for myself, when I first encountered it, I couldn't believe that it was identified as a bias. And I thought, oh my goodness, this is very underlying principle in the way that a lot of us lives. So it's very interesting to look at this hypothesis in order to get a better understanding of the way we function. In short, the just world hypothesis can be summarized into people get what they deserve. Essentially, there are good and bad people out there. And they experience the appropriate consequences. There are countless movies that have this as an underlying theme, where the audience is shown a good guy and a bad guy. And I can't speak for you, but I know that I am pulled to really want the good guy to win and the bad guy

(04:02):
to lose. I almost have this visceral reaction when a bad guy gets it, where they get what they deserve. Andit's a very odd feeling, schadenfreude, wanting to see people who have deserved something bad happened to them actually have something bad happened to them. It's an interesting observation and I I expect a lot of you have experienced this as well.

(04:33):
So the just world hypothesis was explained by Melvin J. Lerner who did some experiments. He had a group ofpeople paired off, and one of each pair was randomly selected to receive a sizable amount of money for their participation. It was an anagram study, and these lucky individuals, post the their participation, thought that they had worked harder and deserved their money, even though it was a random association. This experiment was done in 1965, so this was in the throes of a lot of things that are being reevaluated now in the social sciences. So perhaps this is going to be one of the studies that will be re-evaluated. And I'll come back to you with that. Quoting from the abstract of one of the articles, Lerner writes, "This offers support for the hypothesis, that rejection and devaluation of a suffering victim are primarily based on the

(05:38):
observers needed to believe in a just world." And that's what really he was going at with this and otherexperiments where the underlying principle that they were basing their actions from was this understanding of there being a just world. So just world thinking has a host of other labels, what goes around comes around, everything happens for a reason, you get what you give, everyone gets what they deserve, you reap what you sow, there are probably many others, it's almost impossible to avoid the just world hypothesis.

(06:19):
But at its core, it is a cognitive bias. I'm quoting here from effectiviology.com, I'll put the link in theshow notes. "The just world hypothesis is used by people to justify many of the positive and negative outcomes that they and others experienced by suggesting that there must be a direct, absolute and moral based link between those outcomes and people's actions. This belief can influence people's thinking even when it's contradicted by evidence, showing that there's no link between the morality of someone's actions and the outcomes that they experience. Accordingly, just world thinking represents a flaw in causal attribution, since it involves assuming that the morality of people and their actions necessarily determines associated outcomes, even though that's not the case." We've talked about morality here, religion can underlie this just world

(07:19):
hypothesis. Some people actually call it the just world fallacy, where a divine or supernatural force isresponsible for justice and keeping moral balance in the world. Meritocracy is a very closely related concept, where success is afforded to those who merit it irrespective of the many people the institution's birth lottery and sheer luck, that might have contributed to a person's status in life. I'll put in the shownotes, an article that I had written on meritocracy. It's a very pervasive fallacy, one that very few have broken.

(07:59):
A lovely story is the beloved tale It's a Wonderful Life. So this is a Christmas story. If you haven't seenit, it might be best to save it for Christmas time. But it is a fantastic movie that had a terrible run in its day. It was a flop it did not do well at the box office. It was filmed in the 40s. And it was a film that became popular only because of a clerical error made in 1974. The copyright was not renewed the way it should have been. And because of that, it got into the public domain. And for a while from 1974 to 1994, or 93, depending on which things-you-don't-know-about-movies YouTube, you watch. This was available to virtually everyone and so a whole bunch of even local TV stations, ran it continuously, basically from American Thanksgiving to Christmas. And because of that, it got huge exposure in the late 70s, and throughout the 80s.
At the dawn of quantum mechanics, the world was mechanistic. It was predictable. And quantum mechanics, whichwas around 1900, that's when it was discovered, this kind of Newtonian world was replaced with one with probabilities and uncertainties and chance and fundamental unknowabilities. And that was difficult for people who were living it, it is difficult for people now. At the 1927 Solvay conference, Einstein famously stated that "God does not play dice" at the proposition that a quantum particle cannot be definitively located. His argument was, we must just be missing something. It's a lack in our discovery. It's just our measurement that is imperfect we, we just need to perfect our game. Because this can't be the way it is. Because he was looking for an elegant model of the universe. He was looking on a unifying theory. And we're still looking for that

(09:13):
That copyright error took about 20 years to fix and it was fixed. As I said in 1993 or 4 NBC has the rights toit now they do have it on their station twice during the Christmas season. But because of the incredible exposure it got when that clerical error was in play most of us are aware of It's a Wonderful Life. Saturday Night Live did a fantastic alternate ending to It's A Wonderful Life, which does have a more just world hypothesis ending. I'll put that in the show. notes as well, it will be interesting if you haven't seen that clip to watch it. Because that is really how the movie could have ended, had it been successful. But it was unsuccessful. So nobody cared. In its day, there was a motion picture production code, which most people now know as the Hays Code. It was a reaction to the 20s, where everybody was footloose and fancy free. And there

(10:27):
was a lot of loose morals going on. In the 20s. The Hollywood organization thought well before this getsmandated on us by the government, how about we police ourselves. And that's what this Hays Code was. It was a way to introduce morality, into Hollywood movies, everything had to be presentable and safe. Nothing could be sexually explicit. There could be no swearing or saying offensive things, you had to have good Catholic family values. And the good guys must always win. And the bad guys must always lose. It's a Wonderful Life was a breach of that Hays code when you watch the movie, if you don't know the movie, I suppose I won't spoil it for you. But the bad guy doesn't get punished in this one. In fact, there is an argument to be made that the bad guy wins in this one. This breach of this code that is still in movies today. There are tons of movies that

(11:43):
still follow this, the bad guy has to get it the good guy needs to win - that narrative. We might not evennotice when we're watching It's a Wonderful Life. They broke the code. I'm very glad that it didn't become popular in its day because it wouldn't have been able to have that kind of ending had it been popular, because it would have been caught, it broke the code, we wouldn't have had the incredible movie that we enjoy today.

(12:23):
What can we do with this just world hypothesis, we can start by being a little less certain and more curious,certainly about causation and the belief that people get what they deserve. We can challenge ourselves to think of an alternative explanation of different ways of explaining the same events. We can consider counter examples. So very recently, I was in an ethics conversation, where I had asserted that the younger one is the less able they are to, to speak truth to power. And somebody was challenging that the more education that people have, the more willing they might be, to stand up and say things to speak up when things should be said. I was trying to defend my position with arguments of the social norms are going to dictate what is going to go on, it's very hard to go against your colleagues, especially if they're more senior to you, especially

(15:06):
if they have more experience than you. But then I came up with a counter example, if somebody was exposed to agang in their teenage hood and were in a gang while they were developing, and then left the gang with some fortitude to do that, in their early 20s, that individual might actually have more ability to stand up and give truth to power than a much older person who has experienced much more. So I weakened my own argument by coming up with a counter example, which can be quite helpful if we can come up with our own counter examples. To understand that our argument might not be as solid as we think it is.

(15:54):
We can change our frame, we can put ourselves in someone else's situation. So going back to movies, I thinkJoker with Joachim Phoenix is a portrayal of a bad person, but not in a way that I was describing earlier, not in a way that makes you automatically hate him. It is a far more realistic, nuanced portrayal of what is behind the evil, not just getting us to viscerally hate the evil. Something else we can do is to catch ourselves. When we are watching a movie or the news and realize we are in just world thinking, we can question why we are in it. And if it might be a need to be in control. And if it is addressing a need to be in control, perhaps we can focus our efforts on things that are in our control, and let go of our wish to impose order on a bigger picture.

(17:11):
So this just world hypothesis isn't meant to discount causation entirely, but to keep the fundamentalattribution error, so it's our want to discount environmental factors and play up dispositional or personality factors when attributing causation, it plays in the absolute opposite direction, when we apply it to ourselves, again, just to be aware that when we automatically go to causation and blame, we should begin to question why are we doing this? Are there other ways to see this situation? So just being aware of this bias can be helpful. Because this bias can be a coping mechanism. As I had said, to feel in control, when people don't have a whole lot of control over their own circumstances, this might be the only control that they can exert through this bias. That is an interesting insight that perhaps, when people do believe in these,
now. And he found it very destabilizing to have this fundamental unknowability about the position or momentumof of a quantum particle. Niels Bohr, far less famously, I think, responded, "Stop telling God what to do". And I think the whole story there is rather interesting.

(18:53):
These expanding our vocabulary episodes are meant to give us more language, and it's to help us describe ourworld more fully. They may even help us change our behavior. Overall, I am trying to bring you relevant concepts that you might not encounter otherwise. These are challenging to be sure, but it is through this challenging that we can grow.

(19:22):
I thank you for listening. I don't know if this is your first episode, or if you are a regular listener,having really appreciated some of this content. I just wanted to tell you that I really do appreciate you for listening. If you would like to express your gratitude for this podcast, I would encourage you to buy me a coffee, head on over to buy me a coffee.com/tanyah that's buy b-u-y me m-e a coffee c-o-f-f-e-e all one word.com/t-a-n-y-a-h tanyah. I will put this in the show notes. And I would really sincerely appreciate your support. In addition to that, you can rate and review this podcast and I really, really appreciate that you are here listening to what I am sending out to you guys. Thanks so much.
insidious perhaps, biases, and depending on your viewpoint, there may be an underlying goodness for people whootherwise would have very little lens in which to view the world to be able to continue their existence. But while this has positive outcomes, it can also lead to victim blaming, so we really have to be careful with this. It is a cognitive bias after all, so we really do need to be careful with it.

Adam Johns (20:34):
Thank you so much for listening to Beyond the Minimum with Tanya Hewitt. We hope this episode aligned with you. Maybe it was diametrically opposed to us, at any rate, we trust it made you think. The more we can think about our workplaces and start talking about them, the more we can collectively make a real difference. If you're living in Canada, please find out the Indigenous territory in which you reside. Begin using it to introduce yourself. Please reach out to Tanya through her email [e-mail]. Connect and chat with her on LinkedIn. Follow her company Beyond Safety Compliance. And remember to ask yourself the question, How does your work look? Because we can always go Beyond the Minimum.