 A dark night, he waits. Gotham has many shadows. And evil, fears and need. How's that for poetic justice? We've talked a little bit about cognitive biases and how they can affect our judgment. 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 hardworking 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. Lerner 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 anyone 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. Learner'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 injustices exist somewhere, just not that something unjust might happen to us, that our immediate surroundings aren't karmatastic. And again, this isn't the result of somebody being naive or stupidly optimistic. This is a totally unconscious process that our brains 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 in 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 our brains are all too happy to leap in and say, ah, 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 fallacy 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 going to make a huge difference until you land on their park place for the third time. What instances of the just world fallacy have you experienced? Please leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Thank you very much for watching. Don't forget to blah blah subscribe, blah share, and don't stop thunking.