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WOS:000307679500004 (Nº de Acesso Web of Science) “Prémio Científico ISCTE-IUL 2013” Two factors increase the threat for individuals' belief in a just world (BJW) posed by an innocent victim: the degree of the observer's explicit endorsement of BJW and the fact that the victim shares a common identity with the observer. In this paper, we aim to investigate whether or not these two factors (BJW and ingroup identification) have an interaction effect on each of two mechanisms that reduce the threat to BJW: victim derogation and psychological distancing from the victims. In two studies with university students we predicted and found that BJW interacted with identification with an ingroup victim to predict victim derogation (Study 1) and disidentification from the group shared with the victim (Study 2). In Study 1, the positive relationship between BJW and derogation was significant for strongly identified participants but not for weakly identified participants. In Study 2, high BJW was associated with low ingroup identification only when group salience was activated.

Immanent justice reasoning involves causally attributing a deserved outcome to someone’s prior moral deeds or character, even when such a causal connection is physically implausible. This chapter describes a body of work showing that immanent justice reasoning is (a) motivated, in part, by the need to construe outcomes as deserved; (b) driven by intuitive more than controlled mental processes; and (c) more openly expressed among individuals who believe in supernatural phenomena. This review also documents several additional lines of inquiry exploring key assumptions about the nature, origins, and functions of immanent justice reasoning, including immanent justice reasoning for self-relevant fortuitous outcomes, the social-communicative function of immanent justice reasoning, and the interplay between immanent justice and normative causal reasoning. Early research portrayed immanent justice reasoning as unique to children, but this chapter identifies several conditions under which it is predictably displayed by adults. Immanent justice reasoning serves important psychological functions in adulthood, and is underpinned by reasoning processes and metaphysical assumptions that are not put away when children become adults.

Drawing on theorizing and research suggesting that people are motivated to view their world as an orderly and predictable place in which people get what they deserve, the authors proposed that (a) random and uncontrollable bad outcomes will lower self-esteem and (b) this, in turn, will lead to the adoption of self-defeating beliefs and behaviors. Four experiments demonstrated that participants who experienced or recalled bad (vs. good) breaks devalued their self-esteem (Studies 1a and 1b), and that decrements in self-esteem (whether arrived at through misfortune or failure experience) increase beliefs about deserving bad outcomes (Studies 1a, 1b, 2a, 2b). Five studies (Studies 3-7) extended these findings by showing that this, in turn, can engender a wide array of self-defeating beliefs and behaviors, including claimed self-handicapping ahead of an ability test (Study 3), the preference for others to view the self less favorably (Studies 4-5), chronic self-handicapping and thoughts of physical self-harm (Study 6), and choosing to receive negative feedback during an ability test (Study 7). The current findings highlight the important role that concerns about deservingness play in the link between lower self-esteem and patterns of self-defeating beliefs and behaviors. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.

Many phenomena studied by social psychology are based on ideologies. Ideologies are ideas or systems of ideas inspired by values and objectified in social norms about the way societies should be. This chapter guides our attention to the importance of the ideological dimension of intergroup relations. This dimensions had been emphasized already by Tajfel in his latest writings, but has then been largely neglected in intergroup research. This chapter covers research on explicit ideologies such as colorblindness and multiculturalism as well as equalitarianism and meritocracy, but also on rather ideology constituting fundamental beliefs such as belief in a just world, limited scope of justice, and denial of full humanity to outgroup members. The research the authors report demonstrates how ideologies and shared fundamental beliefs have a pervasive influence on people’s construction of reality and can bias their judgment and their moral feelings, often undetected by their consciousness. Importantly, these processes are fundamental for the legitimization of asymmetric status and power relations between members of different social groups.

This experiment examined whether the frequently observed interactive effect of outcome favorability or fairness and procedural desirability or fairness on perceptions of and reactions to decisions of authorities might be the consequence of people's need to believe in a just world. One hundred and twenty-one business students participated in an in-basket simulation that closely resembled a work organisation. Independent of the in-basket exercise, participants were asked about their just world belief. As expected, the findings indicate that only among those who strongly believe in a just world, a Favorable outcome can decrease people's perception of injustice caused by a biased procedure and an unbiased procedure can decrease people's perception of injustice caused by an unfavorable outcome. In addition, both strong and weak believers reported more anger when the outcome was unfavorable than when it was favorable. But only among those with a strong just world belief, a biased procedure led to more anger than an unbiased procedure. We did not find interactive effects on aggressive voice (i.e. protest behavior)

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to address individual factors predicting punitive attitudes towards sexual and domestic offences and offenders have received little attention. Design/methodology/approach In Study 1,137 participants completed a 25-item online questionnaire exploring individual factors hypothesised to predict punitive attitudes towards four sexual crimes: rape, paedophilia, incest and bestiality. In Study 2,100 participants completed a similar questionnaire exploring individual factors hypothesised to predict punitive attitudes towards male and female emotional, physical and sexual abusers. Findings The standard multiple regression models of Study 1 found that age (i.e. being older), belief in a just world and gender (i.e. being female) were predictors of harsher punitive attitudes. The models of Study 2 found that the low score on the social dominance scale was the most common predictor. Research limitations/implications This survey-based project presents a nuanced picture that could be complemented by the inclusion of a wider range of more complex factors and follow-on qualitative studies. Practical implications The key message from this study is to inform the public on the role of personality factors in developing punitive attitudes. Social implications It is vital to increase the legislators’ and the people’ awareness of the factors shaping the public impressions of criminal justice processes and evidence-based treatment effectiveness. Originality/value This relatively modest paper offers insight of personality factors into people’s punitive attitudes shaping actual legislation.

Summary.-The relationships between support of the traditional role of women in society, political conservatism, and the belief in a just world were investigated by means of a questionnaire given to 93 British undergraduate students. Significant positive relationships were found. Work in the U.S.A. has indicated that the general belief that the world is a just place is a valid psychological construct which has a number of social implications (1). For example, if one believes the world is more or less just as it is, there is less impetus for social change. Accordingly work in the U.S.A. (1) and Britain (2) shows that the belief in a just world correlates positively with political conservatism. Also, if society is seen as fundamentally just, it might also be predicted that believers in this construct would support the traditional status of women. However, although researchers in the U.S.A. have established that belief in a just world is indeed related to support of the traditional role of women in society, the relationships between the support of traditional sex roles, political conservatism and the belief in a just world awaits a systematic investigation in Britain. The present study began this. A sample of 93 undergraduate students were from the University of Liverpool. Each subject was given a questionnaire which included the 20-item Just World Scale (1) and a 20-item inventory designed to measure agreement with the traditional role of women. Sample items from the sex-role inventory are: 'More day nurseries should be provided so that it is easier for women to work'; 'A women should put her husband's career before her own'; 'Mothers who go out to work are neglecting their duties to their children'; and 'A woman's place is at home looking after her family'. Half the items in the sex-role scale were positively worded, and half negatively worded to control for acquiescence response set. All items were scored according to a five-point bipolar Likert scale: strongly disagree--strongly agree. Respondents also indicated their political affiliation. Nineteen respondents failed to state their voting intention or answered 'other'. Consequently data for only 74 respondents (36 males and 38 females) entered the analyses. The over-all mean scores for the Just World and sexrole scales were 55.57 (SD = 8.50) and 28.81 (SD = 14.47), respectively. A two-way unweighted means analysis of variance on the Just World scores (voting intention X sex) gave a significant effect between voting categories (F =

The relationship between rational thinking and belief in a just world was examined using scores on the Rational Behavior Inventory and the Just World Scale from 129 undergraduate students. It was hypothesized that rational thinking would be incompatible with absolutistic beliefs that the world is a just place. A Pearson coefficient of —.11 was computed between scores on the two scales; this supports the hypothesis that neither absolutistic acceptance nor rejection of a belief in a just world is related to rational thinking.

Detailed examination of the Landy & Aronson (1969) data on judging criminal behavior revealed a curious bias in which Ss’ impressions seemed to be considerably more negative toward an unattractive victim than toward an attractive victim, but only slightly more negative toward an unattractive defendant than toward an attractive defendant. The present experiment obtained statistical support for this interaction effect using four dependent measures: favorability of impression, similarity, identification, and trust. The findings were interpreted in terms of Lerners’s (1965) theory of the “belief in a just world” and with an expanded version of Walster’s (1966) “defensive attribution” theory.

[Δε διατίθεται περίληψη / no abstract available], A study was designed to test the just world hypothesis ina situation where the derogation of an innocent victim wassocially proscribed. In a 3 X 2 design, experimental subjectswere asked to indicate their affect for an alleged victim ofNazi atrocities. In one condition, the victim supposedly receivedsevere maltreatment. In the two remaining conditions,the severity of the maltreatment was either moderate or low.It was predicted that, contrary to the just world hypothesis,increased severity of maltreatment of the innocent victimwould not result in his increased derogation. Rather, it was predictedthat the restoration of justice would be realized by theattribution of increased agency of the victim in his suffering anddecreased attribution to him as a victim of circumstance, asthe severity of the suffering increased. The results supportedthe predictions, though the increased attribution of agencyand decreased attribution of victimization by circumstancewere found only in the case of extreme severity of maltreatment.