Belief in a Just World's Impact on Offenders' Deservingness and Negative Event Likelihood, Thesis of Psychology

Download Belief in a Just World's Impact on Offenders' Deservingness and Negative Event Likelihood and more Thesis Psychology in PDF only on Docsity! JUST WORLD VIOLATIONS PROMPT BELIEFS IN KARMIC RETRIBUTION BY JACK MCDONALD THESIS Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Psychology in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2018 Urbana, Illinois Adviser: Assistant Professor Chadly Stern ii ABSTRACT How likely are people to think that someone who perpetrates a crime against another person will experience an adverse event in response? In other words, how much do people believe in karmic retribution? Across three studies, we examined this question in the present research. Participants were randomly assigned to read about a sexual crime that varied in its level of severity (e.g., a man whistles suggestively at a woman vs. a man takes an up-skirt photo of a woman). People who read about more severe crimes thought that a negative event would be more likely to happen to the offender of the crime. Importantly, people thought negative events were more likely to affect offenders of severe crimes even when the event was entirely unrelated to the crime (e.g., getting hit by a car after assaulting a woman), and even if a person did not intentionally create the adverse event (e.g., getting cancer). Dispositional belief in a just world did not consistently moderate the effect of crime severity on the likelihood of negative events. These findings provide novel evidence for the question of how people psychologically manage violations to the belief that the world is fair and just, and provide empirical support that people generally believe in karmic retribution. 2 where someone is an innocent victim of circumstance. The reason why people so readily derogate the victims of crimes is that they believe the world to be fundamentally just, and so in general people not only get what they deserve, but they also deserve what they get (Lerner, 1980). People believe in a just world because, as they grow up, they learn to invest more in long- term benefits and less in short-term ones, and thus they are motivated to believe that the world is fundamentally just and fair to protect their long-term investments (Hafer et al., 2005b; Hafer & Rubel, 2015). This theory helps to explain why people have a motivation to derogate the victim of a crime. Lerner found that people will attempt to compensate (usually by rewarding them or positively rating their character) the victim initially, but if led to believe that the victim will continue to suffer in the future, they instead tended to derogate the victim’s character, such as by presuming that they deserved it somehow (Lerner & Simmons, 1966). Research has shown that people will derogate the victims of various crimes such as rape and robbery, and even victims of life events such as AIDS (Callan et al., 2006; Furnham & Procter, 1992; Furnham, 2003; Hafer & Bègue, 2005a). Derogation occurs because people begin with the assumption that the world is fundamentally just, and then reason why the given event has occurred. When people are presented with a person who appears to be completely innocent it violates their initial conclusion that the world is just, and so they must then determine a way for the person to still be a victim while also maintaining a just world. The way that people do that is usually by assuming that the victim deserved their fate somehow. This assumption also helps people to justify investment in long term outcomes over more short-term ones. Overall, just world theory explains that because innocent victims inherently violate people’s outlook that the world is fair and just, then people are motivated to believe that the victim somehow deserved what happened to them in order to maintain their belief in a just world. 3 Reaction to Offenders The present research attempts to tackle three different gaps in the just world literature. The first gap in the literature is that it addresses very little how people react to the offenders of crimes in the just world framework. Can people also satisfy their just world motive by blaming the offender of crimes? As a whole, the body of research on just world theory has addressed how people react to the victims of crimes, but the offender can also present a challenge to people’s belief in a just world. People can satisfy their just world motive by derogating or compensating the victim, but could not the just world motive be equally satisfied by derogating the person who performed the unjust act (Furnham, 2003; Hafer & Bègue, 2005a)? What if, instead of focusing on what the victim deserves, the focus is instead on what the offender deserves? Previous literature has suggested that people cope with heinous crimes by labeling the offender as evil or labelling the crime as senseless (Ellard et al., 2002; Lodewijkx, 2001). This indicates that in an actual criminal scenario people may think that the offender deserves to have something bad happen to them. However, simply thinking that a criminal is more deserving of a negative event does not necessarily satisfy the just world motive. Someone who commits a crime deserves to go to jail, whereas another person who does not commit a crime does not deserve to go to jail—but that is not a new revelation. What this research contributes to the idea of deservingness is that a criminal would also deserve to have other negative events that are unrelated to the crime happen to them. Karmic Retribution The second gap in the literature is whether the just world motive can be fulfilled by random unrelated events to the injustice. Do people believe that a just world works through the mechanism of karma, or events that are unrelated to the immediate situation, to punish those who 4 have harmed others? In essence, it would seem that people’s belief in a just world operates via “karmic” retribution, where bad people deserve to experience negative events (Callan et al., 2010). It would follow, then, that people would also think that criminals deserve to experience random negative karmic events (events unrelated to the crimes they committed), such as getting into a car accident or getting struck by lightning. Previous work by Harvey and Callan (2014) has shown that people are more willing to entertain the notion that a serious accident was due to a person’s conduct when they were described as a thief than when they were described as a volunteer. Based on this past work, it does indeed seem that people readily come to the conclusion that a person’s past actions can be the cause of unrelated tragic events. The just world literature separates thinking about how past action relates to current events into two broad categories. Maes (1998) characterizes two forms of thinking about justice: immanent justice and ultimate justice. Immanent justice is the idea that events are the result of previous actions, while ultimate justice is unconcerned with a time frame and simply is the promise that injustice will be corrected eventually. For example, if people think that a bad person is more deserving to be in a car crash, then they are supporting immanent justice (Callan et al., 2006). If someone instead thinks that a bad person will receive their punishment in the afterlife, then they are thinking based off ultimate justice. Both of these beliefs can and are held together in peoples’ minds. Belief in ultimate justice usually acts as a coping mechanism whereby people are able to rely on the belief that justice will ultimately win out in order to steel themselves from a perceived injustice that they might not be able to correct, while imminent justice belief is associated with direct responses that try to immediately correct an injustice (Maes & Kals, 2002). It is through these two beliefs in a just world that people defend and maintain their belief that the world overall is just. Karmic retribution can act both as a form of imminent justice as well as 7 In the present research, we examined three main hypotheses: (a) people will judge that offenders who commit worse just world violations will be more deserving and more likely to have a negative event happen to them, (b) people will spontaneously generate unrelated karmic events in response to just world violations, and (c) people who believe more strongly in a just world will ascribe more deservingness and more likelihood of negative events to offenders as compared to people who do not strongly believe in a just world. Studies 1a and 1b addressed whether people will blame offenders and whether this effect is magnified by a stronger belief in a just world. Study 2 again addressed whether people will blame offenders and also examined whether people will spontaneously generate karmic events. 8 CHAPTER 2: STUDY 1a Our first study attempts to answer the question of whether people think that negative events are more likely to occur to those who more strongly violate the just world motive. In the past, research has successfully manipulated the strength of just world violations by varying the severity of health problems suffered by someone (Sherman, Smith, & Cooper, 1982-83; Sloan & Gruman, 1983). We provided participants with short vignettes about a crime happening to someone and manipulated the severity of the crime between conditions to vary how strongly the just world motive had been violated. To maintain consistency among vignettes and previous literature, all of the crimes were of a sexual nature (Hafer & Bègue, 2005a). We then asked participants how deserving and how likely it was that something bad would happen to the offender. Belief in a just world was also measured to see whether it had a significant effect on participant responses. Methods Participants Participants were 319 Amazon Mechanical Turk workers from the United States (Mage = 38.57, SD = 12.74; 150 male, 166 female, 2 other gender, 1 no gender provided). They received $0.40 for completing the study. Five additional participants were excluded for failing an attention check (described below). Procedures Vignette. Participants completed the survey online using Qualtrics. After giving their consent, participants were informed that they would read a scenario and answer questions about it. Participants were randomly assigned to read one of six possible scenarios involving a woman 9 who was the recipient of an event. All scenarios followed the same format of: “Mary is walking home after spending the afternoon studying at her friend’s apartment. It is about 8:00 PM by the time she leaves so it is dark outside. On her way home, [event]. Mary walks the rest of the way home without incident.” The possible event were: “a man walks past her” (n = 52), “a man walks up behind her and whistles loudly and suggestively at her” (n = 64), “a man walks up behind her and she hears a loud shutter sound as well as a flash as he takes an up skirt photo of her” (n =56), “a man walks up behind her and slaps her butt” (n = 43), “a man walks up behind her and grabs her breast over her clothes” (n = 57), “a man walks up behind her and aggressively grabs at her chest, groping her and tearing her blouse” (n = 47). Crime Severity. Crime severity was measured to gauge how strongly people’s just world motive had been violated (Gruman & Sloan, 1983). The crimes in the vignettes were chosen based on pilot data, which showed that they have a good distribution of crime severity. Pilot participants were one hundred sixty Amazon Mechanical Turk workers from the United States (Mage = 37.14, SD = 11.95; 79 male, 81 female). Participants were shown one of the vignettes above (in addition to some that were not selected for use in the current research) and asked, “How serious of a crime do you think occurred in this scenario?” They responded on a 1 (not at all serious) to 9 (very serious) scale. The severities were: no event (Mseverity = 1.21, SD = 0.83, n = 24), whistle (Mseverity = 2.69, SD = 1.49, n = 16), take picture (Mseverity = 7.26, SD = 1.33, n = 19), slap butt (Mseverity = 4.69, SD = 2.09, n = 16), grab breast (Mseverity = 5.78, SD = 2.05, n = 18), tear blouse (Mseverity = 7.18, SD = 1.38, n = 17). Deservingness of negative event. Participants indicated how deserving the offender is to have something bad happen to him on a 1 (not at all deserving) to 7 (very deserving) scale. 12 by a significant interaction between belief in a just world and crime severity, B = 0.07, SE = .03, t(315) = 2.12, p = .04, 95% CI = [0.01, 0.13], rsp = .11. This interaction is shown in Figure 1. We decomposed the interaction through examining the effect of crime severity for people high (1 SD above the mean) and low (1 SD below the mean) in belief in a just world (Aiken & West, 1991). There was a significant effect of crime severity both for participants high in belief in a just world, B = 0.46, SE = .06, t(315) = 7.37, p < .001, 95% CI = [0.34, 0.59], rsp = .37, and low in belief in a just world, B = 0.28, SE = .06, t(315) = 4.60, p < .001, 95% CI = [0.16, 0.40], rsp = .23. As the severity of the crime increased, participants who are both high and low in belief in a just world believed that the offender was more likely to experience a negative event. However, the extent to which crime severity increased the perceived likelihood of a negative events was stronger for people high (vs. low) in belief in a just world.1 Discussion Study 1a provides initial evidence for our hypothesis. People who read about a more severe crime thought it was more likely that a bad event would happen to the offender. We also found evidence that people thought a worse offender was more deserving to have something bad happen to him, which replicated previous work (Callan et al., 2006; Harvey & Callan, 2014). There was conflicting evidence about whether belief in a just world affected people’s responses: there was no effect on ratings of deservingness, but there was an effect on ratings of likelihood. 1 We conducted analyses to examine whether participant gender moderated any observed effects. Linear regression was performed, including crime severity, belief in a just world, gender, and their interactions as the independent variables. Deservingness of the offender to have something bad happen was the dependent variable. There was not a significant main effect of gender, B = -0.13, SE = 0.09, t(315) = -1.49, p = .14, 95% CI = [-0.29, 0.04], rsp = -.06, but there was a significant interaction between crime severity and gender, B = -0.08, SE = 0.04, t(315) = -2.01, p = .045, 95% CI = [-0.15, -0.002], rsp = -.08. There was not a significant interaction between gender and belief in a just world, B = 0.07, SE = 0.06, t(315) = 1.04, p = .30, 95% CI = [-0.06, 0.19], rsp = -.06. There was also not a significant main effect of gender when likelihood was used as the dependent variable, B = -0.06, SE = 0.10 t(315) = -0.60, p = .55, 95% CI = [-0.26, 0.14], rsp = -.03, or interaction between gender and crime severity, B = -0.02, SE = 0.04, t(315) = -0.51, p = .61, 95% CI = [-0.11, 0.06], rsp = -.026 or gender and belief in a just world, B = -0.02, SE = 0.08, t(315) = -0.26, p = .80, 95% CI = [-0.17, 0.13], rsp = -.01. 13 We conducted Study1b to ensure that we would have enough power to detect whether belief in a just world impacts deservingness and likelihood ratings. 14 CHAPTER 3: STUDY 1b Introduction Study 1b was a direct replication of Study 1a with more participants to ensure that we had adequate power to detect our predicted effects. Methods Participants Participants were 711 Amazon Mechanical Turk workers from the United States (Mage = 39.54, SD = 13.25, 453 females, 256 males, 2 other gender). This N provided us with at least 80% power to detect the smallest predicted observed effect in Study 1a (r = 0.11), which was the interaction between crime severity and belief in a just world on the likelihood of a negative event. All power analyses were conducted using G Power (Faul, Erdfelder, Lang, & Buchner, 2007). Participants received $0.40 in exchange for completing the study. Twenty additional participants were excluded for failing an attention check. Procedure The procedure was nearly identical to Experiment 1a. The only difference was that we changed the wording of our questions to ask about “the man” instead of “the offender” to prevent confusing the participants assigned to read that there was not a crime. The number of participants in each condition were: no event (n = 121), whistle (n = 102), take picture (n = 123), slap butt (n = 127), grab breast (n = 126), tear blouse (n = 112). Reliability of the Belief in a Just World Scale was good (α = .88). Results Do crime severity and belief in a just world increase how much people think that the offender deserves to suffer from a negative event? 17 CHAPTER 4: STUDY 2 Introduction Study 2 investigated whether participants’ beliefs of which negative events might happen to the offender were a result of legal (police based) or karmic (unrelated events) intervention. Our findings were consistent with the possibility that people who read about a worse crime thought it was more likely that the criminal would experience a negative event that was unrelated to the crime. However, an alternative explanation for our findings is that people who read about a worse crime thought it was more likely for the person to experience a negative legal event (e.g., being arrested). Another concern we wished to address is the lack of open-ended questions in previous literature. People have always been presented with a scenario where the karmic event has already occurred and then they are asked how deserving the person was to have it occur (Hafer & Bègue, 2005a). Asking people to respond to a specific scenario can be problematic due to its limiting of their response options. People often rate their agreement to a statement more highly when it is part of a close-ended question as compared to when they are allowed to freely respond with statements (Geer, 1988; Reja et al., 2003). This research looks at what events people will spontaneously generate in response to a perceived injustice. This allows examination of what people actually consider to be a just response to the perceived injustice. To address the above potential problems, in Study 2 we allowed participants to fill in their own responses for what they thought might happen to the criminal they read about. Those responses were then coded based on whether they represented a legal (police) or non-legal (karmic) response. We also coded the responses based on whether they involved someone directly harming the offender or not so that we could differentiate between karmic responses that were intentional (e.g., a mob 18 beating up the offender) and those that were non-intentional (e.g., the offender being struck by lightning). Methods Participants Participants were 736 Amazon Mechanical Turk workers from the United States (Mage = 36.61, SD = 12.31, 332 females, 401 males, 2 other gender, 1 unanswered). Participants received $0.40 in exchange for completing the study. Fifteen additional participants were excluded for failing an attention check. Procedure Vignette. Participants took the survey online using Qualtrics. After giving their consent, participants were informed that they would read a scenario and answer questions about it. Participants were randomly assigned to read one of six possible scenarios involving a woman who was the victim of a crime. These scenarios were identical to the ones described in Study 1a. The number of participants in each condition were: no event (n = 121), whistle (n = 120), take picture (n = 123), slap butt (n = 131), grab breast (n = 134), tear blouse (n = 107). Individual likelihoods. To assess participants’ beliefs of what negative events the offender would experience, we asked participants to list the specific events they thought he would experience. Participants could list up to ten events. For example, participants listed events such as being diagnosed with cancer and being arrested by the police. On average, people gave 3.42 responses (SD = 1.92). For each event, participants indicated the perceived likelihood that it would occur using a 1 (not at all likely) to 7 (very likely) scale. Coding of negative events. Participants entered a total of 2,255 events. These events were coded to address two different questions. 19 Legal versus non-legal events. The events were coded by the first author as either being “legal based” or “non-legal based.” Legal events enforce and punish the offender through legal means, and non-legal events were those that were enacted by anyone not representing the law or chance events. 608 of these events were legal based, such as “incarceration” or “someone will call the police on the man.” 1,647 of the listed events were non-legal based, such as “cancer” or “stabbed.” Intentional versus non-intentional events. The events were also coded as to whether they were “intentional” or “non-intentional.” “Intentional” events were those where there was an actor involved who purposefully intended to execute a negative event on the offender, such as “someone will beat him up”. “Non-intentional” events were those in which there was not an active agent carrying out a negative event on the offender, such as “struck by lightning”. All of the legal events were also intentional (e.g., a person in the legal system was purposefully arresting the offender or putting him in jail). As such, coding of intentionality was only performed on non-legal events. Results Does Crime Severity Increase the Perceived Likelihood of a Negative Event? We first examined whether the severity of the crime was associated with how likely participants thought it was that a negative event would occur. The correlation between crime severity and the likelihood of any negative event occurring was significant, r(734) = .42, p < .001. This finding replicates the previous studies and indicates that as people read about more severe crimes, they thought that it was more likely that the offender would experience a negative outcome. Does Crime Severity Increase the Perceived Likelihood of Legal versus Non-Legal Events? 22 Study 2 provides more evidence for the hypothesis that worse offenders are thought to be more likely to have negative events happen to them. Study 2 also strengthens this hypothesis by having people generate exact scenarios that they think will happen to the offender instead of asking about a general negative event. In addition, Study 2 shows that people think that legal recourse is more likely to happen for more severe crimes to a greater degree than non-legal events. This same trend is also true for intentional events (i.e., ones with purposeful actors) increasing in likelihood more than non-intentional events (i.e., ones that do not involve human intervention) as crime severity increases. 23 CHAPTER 5: GENERAL DISCUSSION We tested three hypotheses in the present research. The first was that people would derogate the offenders of crimes. The second hypothesis was that this derogation takes the form of people believing that karmic events unrelated to crimes are more likely to happen to the offenders. The third hypothesis was that these effects would be moderated by how strongly people believed the world to be just. Across two studies, we have shown that not only do people believe that offenders of worse crimes are more deserving of negative things happening to them, but that they also believe that those negative things are actually more likely to happen to them. In addition, people believe that random unrelated “karmic” events are also more likely to happen to these criminals. This builds upon the existing literature of just world theory and helps address gaps in the literature (Lerner & Simmons, 1966): if people believe that the world is just and fair, then they will be motivated to believe that victims somehow deserve what they get, and that offenders will face consequences for their actions, even if through karmic retribution (e.g., getting hit by a runaway truck on the road). In line with previous research, we found almost no effect of individual differences in belief in a just world—and when we did, they were small. Potentially, this is because people are not always willing to explicitly endorse their belief in a just world, or because there simply is not much variance between people in how much they believe the world to be just (Lerner, 1998). Implications for Just World Theory The first contribution of this paper are the results concerning dispositional belief in a just world. As predicted, we found that people’s ratings of the likelihood of negative events happening to criminals increased the more that they have a dispositional belief in a just world. That dispositional belief in a just world does not moderate the observed relationship between 24 crime severity and likelihood rating, but instead is a main effect on ratings of likelihood. This is consistent with previous research indicating that people who more strongly believe in a just world tend to be more punitive, and therefore it would be expected that they would have higher overall ratings of likelihood of negative events happening to offenders (Begue & Bastounis, 2003). Part of the reason we found an effect of belief in a just world where others did not is potentially because of the specificity of the scale that we employed. Lipkus’ (1991) Global Belief in a Just World Scale reflects many of the ultimate justice concepts that we were attempting to measure in our experiments. If we had used a more general scale of belief in a just world, such as Rubin and Peplau’s (1975) scale, it might have been more difficult to find the results that we did. Another concern with using Rubin and Peplau’s (1975) scale is that it included reverse scored items, and researchers have since found that those items more closely measure the construct of believing in an unjust world, which is not the same as disbelieving in a just world (Furnham, 1998, 2003; Furnham & Procter, 1989; Maes, 1998b; Schmitt, 1998). Another, more recent scale, that could produce different results from what was found here is the Personal Belief in a Just World Scale (Dalbert, 1999). This scale is more closely associated with immanent justice concepts, and as such it might find that people still think that an offender is more likely to suffer from a negative event, but that those who score highly on the Personal Belief in a Just World Scale will lean more towards immediate, non-karmic means of rectifying injustice. Someone who strongly believes in immanent personal justice will most likely generate negative events that quickly solve the injustice, such as the police catching the offender, or the offender being beaten up. Someone who strongly believes in global, ultimate justice, on the other hand, is more likely to generate more long term karmic solutions to the injustice, such as cancer or being struck by lightning. Those who strongly adhere to immanent justice require these 27 of negative events happening to the offender, such that peoples’ just world would be less violated by a stereotypical crime and so they would assign less likelihood of a negative event to the offenders of those stereotypical crimes. Concluding Remarks In the present research, we have shown that people will go so far as to spontaneously generate unrelated negative events in response to a perceived injustice. These findings extend existing literature on just world theory through exploring perceptions of karmic retribution toward perpetrators of just world violations. 28 CHAPTER 6: FIGURES Figure 1. Interaction of crime severity and individual belief in a just world on the likelihood that a bad event would happen to the offender in Study 1a. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Low Crime Severity High Crime Severity L ik el ih o o d o f B ad E v en t Likelihood of a Bad Event Based on Belief in a Just World and Crime Severity Low Just World Belief High Just World Belief 29 Figure 2. Interaction of crime severity and individual belief in a just world on the likelihood that a bad event would happen to the offender in Study 1b. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Low Crime Severity High Crime Severity L ik el ih o o d o f B ad E v en t Likelihood of a Bad Event Based on Belief in a Just World and Crime Severity Low Just World Belief High Just World Belief 32 REFERENCES Aiken, L. S., West, S. G., & Reno, R. R. (1991). Multiple regression: Testing and interpreting interactions. Sage. Alter, C. (2014). Todd Akin Still Doesn’t Get What’s Wrong With Saying ‘Legitimate Rape’. Time. 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APPENDIX A: INSTITUTIONAL REVIEW BOARD APPROVAL LETTER UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN Oifice of the Vice Chancellor for Researeh Office for the Protection of Research Subjects BOS West Pennsylvania Ave Urbana, IL 61801 September 6, 2017 Chadly Stem Psychology 433 Psychology Bldg 603 E Daniel St Champaign, IL 61820 RE: — Limits of Belief in a Just World IRB Pratocel Number: 17170 Dear Dr, Stern: This letter authorizes the use of human subjects in your continuing project entitled Limits of Beltef in a Just World. ‘The University of Ilinois at Urbana-Champaign Lastitutional Review Board (IRB) approved the protocol as described in your [RB-1 application, by expedited continuing review. The expiration date for this protocol, IRB number 17170, is 09/04/2020. The risk designation applied to your project is a0 more than minimal risk, The IRB has also reviewed the request for minor modifications. | will officially note for the record that these minor modifications to the original project, as noted in your correspondence received 8/30/2017, Increasing targeted enrollment, have been approved. Copies of the attached date-stamped consent form(s) must be used in obtaining informed consent. If there is a need to revise or alter the consent form(s), please submit the revised form(s) for IRB review, approval, and date-stamping, Prior to use, Please note that additional modifications to your project need to be submitted to the IRB for review and approval before the modifications are initiated. To submit modifications to your protocol, please complete the IRB Research 8 fo Unless modifications are made to this projec, no further submittals are required tothe IRB. ‘You were granted a three-year approval. If there are any changes to the protocol that result in your study becoming ineligible for the extended approval period, the RPI is responsible for immediately notifying the IRB via an amendment. The protocol will be issued a modified expiration date accordingly. We appreciate your conscientious adherence to the requirements of human subjects rescarch. If you have any questions about the IRB process, or if you need assistance at any time, please feel free to contact me at the OPRS- office, or visit our website at https://www.oprs.research.illinois.edu. huh lon Michelle Lore, MS Human Subjects Research Specialist, Office for the Protection of Research Subjects Attachment(s): 3 Consent Forms c: Jack McDonald Sean Laurent U of Illinois at Urbana- ham, aign * IORGO000014 + FWA #00008584 7333-3670 38