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The Group-Fantasy That the World Plays Fair

The Belief in a Just World: A Fundamental Delusion, Melvin J. Lerner, New York: Plenum Press, 1980. 209 pp

Stanley Rosenman
The Journal of Psychohistory V. 25, N. 3, Winter 1998

Lloyd deMause sent me Lerner's book with winning flattery about being uniquely qualified to evaluate it. The title itself proved an epiphany. It suggested that belief in a just world (BJW) was a widespread group-fantasy all too little confronted by psychohistorians. I recalled the self-comforting remarks of German civilians forced in 1945 to view the murder camps' mangled, starved corpses, exclaiming that the dead must have done horrible things to warrant such punishment, i.e., Germany had treated them properly, that the viewers had no reason to feel disquiet about what they as German citizens had supported or what their government might do to them. The American white middle class came to mind: their quietly tolerating the increasing economic superfluousness of minority males and then, with pleasurable indignation, looking on the resulting degradation; finally, the spectators rationalize that the jobless control their fate and are getting what they asked for. Further, I pondered, much of mankind's striving for meaning intends to fathom the different distributions of favors by fate: treatment by parents, early endowment, whether one's ethnic and class group is particularly subject to tragedy. Constantly, the person compares self with others, often with spin-offs of envy of advantaged persons and invidiousness toward as well as fear of those less blessed. An unwelcome association to the title cropped up: that my own excessive agitation sprinkled with self-pity at personal setbacks is partly based on a conviction that the ordeal was not deserved; in addition, my suffering is a bid to a Just Power to make things right. Apparently, I had not better prepared myself for reverses because of the naive trust that one's fate is meted out fairly.

I told deMause that the topic was fascinating but that the book had been published sixteen years ago. "Go ahead, anyway," he replied.

By way of ingenious experiments, often with college sophomores as subjects, Lerner and his colleagues mostly in the 1970s pursued the vicissitudes of BJW. They are to be credited with ferreting out a basic premise with important implications for political and social action.

However, psychohistorians have been largely inattentive to this pervasive premise along with its having been investigated by social psychologists. But then psychohistorians take little heed of social psychology and its synchronic approach. Social psychologists reciprocate with indifference to and ignorance of psychohistory. The mutual remoteness raises the question as to why students of behavior in adjoining fields are so aloof. One cause inheres in the narcissism of small differences, a fear that one's unique identity and claims are threatened by a similar field; a compensating arrogance that defends against being uninformed of and finds alien, perhaps anxiety-provoking, the other field's assumptions, procedures, jargon, findingsÑand not least, protects against the other's patent disinterest in one's own discoveries. Fruitful exchanges are sacrificed on the altar of vanity.

The diachronic psychohistorian would immediately wonder why BJW became one of social psychology's hot button issues in the 1970s. Conceivably, the horrors of the Holocaust were sufficiently muted by time to allow scrutiny by academics of issues of trust and victimization, issues freshly kindled by the iniquities of the Vietnam War.

Concern with BJW is also an outgrowth of a major focus in social psychology since the late 1950s: attribution theory. This area studies how ordinary persons make judgments about the motivations, purposes, and competencies of self and others along with whether an action has internal or external causes. Advancing beyond stimulus-response models, attribution theory views man as a cognitively consistent intuitive psychologist attempting to draw inferences that account for behavior. When coping with calamities, causal attribution may serve to reinstate some sense of control over the environment. Thus a vital consideration in deciding the merit of the afflicted is the need to maintain the concept of the world as equitable. Consequently, to maintain BJW, one may blame the victim. (Cf. Heider, 1958; Jones, 1971; Myers, 1983; Ross, 1977; Wortman, 1976.)

Lerner's thesis follows. Helpless, seeking stability in his or her world, wanting to trust it, the person wishfully credits it with equitability and virtue. Obviously, a calamity arouses dread that it could happen to anyone, to oneself; it could be the result of circumstances beyond anyone's control or ability to anticipate. Anxiety is eased should the person decide that the misfortune was in truth predictable; not to worry: it could have been avoided by the shrewd observer. Or the victim is held responsible; the victim earned his adversity. Should he have clearly been innocent, he is derogated by the observer, e.g., even when the experiment makes plain that the outcome occurred by chance, the victimized subjects are devaluated: innocent victims threaten the concept of a just world. By defining himself as sharply different from the unfortunate person, the onlooker confirms that he would not bring such wretchedness upon himself, that his world will play fair with him.

The more serious the events befalling the victim, the more the observer feels threatened, and therefore seeks to punish him (Walster, 1966). Correspondingly, the more desirable the consequences of an action, the more observers believe that the subject's behavior was laudable, his personal qualities admirable.

Lerner notes that a world interpreted as fair and upright does permit bad things to happen should someone act wickedly or stupidly. In this construction of the world, people get what they deserve and deserve what they get. Deserving is seen as relative to the subject's effort, his contributions to a task, his station in life, what he can win in a fair competition, whether the subject is in the same world as the observer and the subject's place in it.

Believers in a just worId are set somewhat apart by distinctive characteristics. They are more authoritarian, see the locus of control of one's behavior as internal, trust othersÑespecially authorities - have confidence in the system, and are more religious (Rubin and Peplau, 1975).

Lerner points out that benefits may be yielded by BJW. Believing that one lives in a just world, people may attend their activities with confidence in their prospects, forgo immediate gratification in order to make efforts that will pay off in the future. BJW encourages good behavior, hard work, respect for authorities; also, the afflicted and the dying are comforted that a life of good deeds will be rewarded.

Faced with a catastrophe, like losing a loved one, many feel that BJW, even if it entails holding oneself responsible, serves to restore meaning. Despite illogical fault-finding and self-directed hostility, blaming oneself for the calamity (like one's child dying of cancer) facilitates regaining the meaningfulness that the calamity drained from existence. Self-blame banishes the intolerable conviction that nothing can avoid a calamity that has come about impersonally and randomly.
Another occasional boon of BJW is generating altruistic behavior. Seeing oneself as acting helpfully supports the belief that justice prevails. People seem wired to eliminate the suffering of clearly innocent victims. Maximizing the benefit one can obtain from a situation is often less desired than receiving no more than what one deserves. When faced with an impending critical event, firm believers in a just world will engage in symbolic acts, perhaps altruistic ones, in order to make fate more benignly disposed to one's objectives.

However, in larger measure, when witnessing others in a sorry state, BJW supplies rational strategies for inaction, curbing generous conduct. BJW's negative repercussions issue from its denial that suffering takes place or, when it is acknowledged, its assurance that the victim is blameworthy. Thus a main scheme to not assist, Lerner continues, is to see the victim's fate as due to his own actions or character. Another important barrier to helping is the fear of losing one's correct place in a just world; i.e., the cost of helping will be too depleting. The person can facilely explain taking care of himself and leaving others to suffer if the reason can be located in the set of norms which assumes that all people have a right to look out for themselves. Social agencies are there to help the woeful. Or one denies that misery is extant. Anyway, suffering benefits the soul. Some people live in a different world, they don't suffer in conditions that would oppress occupants of one's own world.

For Lerner, more than viewing BJW as simply an inhibitor of altruistic behavior, BJW creates a chilling image of humanity. It is ironic that BJW often upholds the victimized status of society's unfortunates, leading to the widespread hardship of innocents. For our own security we add to the unfairness by finding grounds to condemn the victims. The greater the imposed misery, the more the observer, with selfish, simple-minded reasoning, loathes the victim.

Wisely, Lerner proposes that people tend to form a two-level theory of the just world. To a young child any misfortune is grasped as punishment for disobedience. This early belief in "immanent justice" (Piaget, 1949) holds that a fault automatically brings about its own punishment, assisted by omniscient parents. As we mature, the increasing commitment to reality dictates that most of us recognize the existence of fate's partiality. Still, we need to deny the presence of inequity in order to function adequately. So we defend against instances of arbitrariness. In a way our claim to believe that injustice exists is fraudulent since our activities postulate that the world is just, at any rate that our world is just; we can procure what we deserve.

People advance social explanations for a calamity striking some people and not others. If these explanations reduce threat, they are retained and transmitted to succeeding generations. For illustration: our culture connects sin and suffering; the Protestant Ethic states success is an outcome of hard work.

Largely with experiments inventively varying the situations in which confederates who are seemingly exposed to electric shocks are rated by observers, Lerner attempted to elicit the assumptions people devise about the just world, in what ways they hold the concept, its importance, its sources, its determination of reactions to victims. Adroit experiments were designed to answer questions posed by earlier experiments or to disprove the primacy of alternate explanations to BJW offered by colleagues; e.g., condemning a victim was the result of something repugnant in his behavior or that the brain maintains a unifying harmony among cognitive elements (e.g., wickedness and failure go together) or that subjects defend against guilt because of not pursuing that natural tendency to help or that observers simply wish to identify with people who are successful.

As opening to the following critique of Lerner's work, I wish to express my admiration for his painstaking, creative achievement in developing the fluctuating fate of BJW. The originality and comprehensiveness of his endeavors supply modulating context to these critical remarks.

Subjects seemed mostly female sophomores from a fundamentalist college. Moreover, satisfied with finding significant statistical trends based on paper and pencil questionnaires, there was little depth interviewing, particularly of those not in the majority group. We learn little of the characteristics of the world that they experienced. While Lerner mocks the Pollyanna view of the firm believers in the fairness of the world, for the most part he took care not to obtain or interview observers who, possibly having been thrust into the belly of the beast, may have had a nightmarish vision of the world. Confronted with flamboyantly unexpected behavior, Lerner dismisses it as hysterical rather than allowing himself to be led to surprises. Some experimental results were pressed into his framework wherein malevolence was excluded or rendered banal. Adjoining historical and psychoanalytic fields of study were not tapped. These barriers appear to circumscribe scrutiny of a topic whose shadowy underside is maleficence in the world - a dimension other than impersonality and chance that are also opposites of justice and decency.

Lerner expresses horror that people, selfishly seeking personal security through BJW, inadvertently add to the misery of unfortunates. He shows disdain that colleagues and subjects are not more in touch with victimization. But apparently they are employed as vessels for his own hesitancy in more fully fathoming sinister aspects of the human psyche. While mentioning the hypothesis of perception being formed on the basis of inherited modes of organizing experience, no acknowledgment is given to M. Klein's seminal contention that the destructive drive has primary influence in organizing the infant's perceptions. Lerner clings tightly to the assumption that people organize their concepts only so as to enhance their sense of security and well-being; at their worst, people lack empathy; fiendish behavior appears grounded in egotism.

But this way of thinking lacks concordance with the genocidal and cannibalistic sacrificial frenzies that sweep over nationsÑoften in their efforts to implement their vision of what justice entails. Providing seemingly sensible reasons for their decision, nations zealously launch wars to vent murderous and sacrificial urges. Who can blot out the portrayals of the mirthful expressions of German soldiers as they tormented old Jews? Or read without dismay Goldhagen's (1996) tale of the ease with which ordinary Germans of the mobile killing units volunteered for and did the work of shooting the old, the sick, and the children wherever they were found in a newly occupied ghetto? Another example is provided by the requirement of justice put forward by endist thinkers: they call for the apocalyptic destruction of vast populations while only the believers are "raptured" up to heaven. Here an implacable God imposing justice on the world acts as the delegate of the believer's vindictive wishes. Lerner does not entertain the possibility that his righteous subjects took covert pleasure in the injury of subjects, glee in directly adding to their distress by depreciating them. Then again, Lerner was defending himself against colleagues who accused him of being too cynical in his view of mankind!

A vivid case in point of Lerner's blotting out jarring data of the demonic aspects of humankind occurred during his lecture to a freshman medical class. They were watching a video of the victim (a confederate) receiving (professed) electric shocks. With each shock and the hurt reaction of the victim, laughing and stomping of feet by the students grew louder. At the end of the tape, the group roared with convulsive laughter. Despite being in a sound-proofed hall, the class below was disrupted. Lerner labeled the conduct mass hysteria, noting that a similar response would be induced in other classes unless special measures were taken to avoid it. He infers that this behavior by the students reduced tension and minimized the threat from watching the subject suffer. No argument here; he is correct as far as he goes. But omitted is that, facilitated by a group process, tranced ego states became dominant: the individual's bad internal object together with one's defenseless bad child self, externally represented by the victim, merits punishment. The vulnerable child ego state had been activated by the immediate unhappy fortune suffered by the subject. The observer has then put his own impotent state when beset by calamities into the subject, derogating the subject for having this abhorred trait. Also, expression was given to the bad object's thrill in the victim's suffering. These dissociated constituents of the ego, some of which are identified with the aggressor, are ready precipitants during early childhood of not quite good enough parenting. They lend credence to the view that the relishing of victims is common. (See Atlas, 1990; Berghold, 1991; deMause, 1982, 1996; Fairbairn, 1994; Klein, 1968; Seinfeld, 1990.)

The results of another experiment were wrongly assigned by Lerner to the observers preserving their BJW. Upset if the less appealing subject won, the observers desired that the arbitrary award be given to the more winsome of two males. But fairness would decree that the less engaging male win to make up a little for his burden of unattractiveness. In wanting the latter to lose, it is as if the observer would push him a little deeper into life's sacrificial pit. And is it not feasible that the result also gives voice to that observer, who, feeling guilt at obtaining more than his bad object approves, therefore places the attractive winner in a similarly privileged position in order to watch how he handles fate's envious Furies?

Joining with other observers to witness the video of a presumed experimental subject being exposed to painful electric shocks for the sake of somehow advancing psychology essentially comes down to attending a ceremonial sacrifice of an individual for a murky group process. As proposed above, a group trance is evoked in which the dissociated ego states of the bad object and its complementary bad child self are activated (Fairbairn, 1994; Ogden, 1986) or, according to deMause (1982, 1996), derived from the pervasive traumas of childhood, fractured ego states identifying with an internal persecutor and a concordant bad self who deserves punishment for being greedy, dependent - or given a double-binding persecutor, for aspiring to autonomy. When the observer denigrates the pained subject, one key psychological event taking place, other than safeguarding one's BJW, is that the former's bad object (or internal persecutor) is happily joining the sacrificers by adding to the subject's torment. At the same time, the subject is employed by the tranced observer as container for the abhorred helpless self. The observer disparages in the subject the former's nonpreferred characteristics. Being rid of these undesirable traits for the while, no wonder the observer feels anew that all is right with the world. Another variation of this scenario is that the detested self presents the bad internal object with the demeaned subject as a sacrificial offering.

Besides discharge of sadistic and masochistic drives, partaking in social sacrifices permits other gratifications. The observer's abused self may perceive the subject as the childhood victimizer and takes revenge. By being party to the sacrifice and thus identifying with the calamitous force, the observer may feel he will not be afflicted by the calamity. "I am close to the Power and it prefers me to the pathetic victim" (cf. A. Freud, 1936). Additionally, the group trance with its loosened ego boundaries may transport the observer into an exhilarated godlike state manifest in the control of the victim's life or death. Anxious because of the de-differentiation of social categories - Ñgender, class, race, religionÑthe observer defines the sacrifices as reinforcing we-them feelings (Girard, 1972; Dervin, 1994); this closeness to one's group brings about the blissful affect of symbiosis. The observer is motivated to devalue the subject since that too further strengthens the boundary between them. In measure, the concept of my just world and implicitly my just self may be conjured up to fend off guilty fears of retribution for the immoral sacrificial act in which one had a hand.

Another constellation links BJW and sacrificial events. The individual is comforted and steadied by his belief in a just world. The concept serves as a parental holding presence, offering a protective shield to that insecure child that carries on in all adults. The belief sets forth an illusive attuned, decent cosmos. In addition to enabling the person to pursue goals, it fills in the holes that have been punched in his psyche by trauma (cf. Slochower, 1996; Winnicott, 1965). The belief heals while fending off those states we all pass through of hopeless futility in which the self is represented as debilitated and the world as bleak, chronically harrying, empty of humane qualities.

On the other hand, the person is aware that the concept of a just world is a fiction; misfortune strikes all too often, unexpectedly, randomly. Freud stated that one condition for a blow reaching traumatic intensity is that the unwary victim is caught off guard. Suspecting that it reduces vigilance, individuals are conflicted in their embrace of the just world concept.

To observe a sacrifice imparts a potential space (Winnicott, 1971) in which the individual may contemplate with a degree of objectivity that ill-fortune overtakes many who neither warranted nor instigated it. The observer may then consider his own reactions should he endure a downfall. Following a severe reversal, there takes place an almost inevitable interval of numbing, loss and grief, mortification, indignation, rage, paranoid self-pity, masochistic self-blame, entitlement to wait passively for the world to right itself. The observer may mull over the question of whether he will fight to pass through these inexorable emotions in order to refurbish his link to life or will he, crushed and embittered, evermore remain devitalized.

Some grandiose nations have engaged in genocidal behavior in part because of fury at the stipulations of existence. Sometimes in the years following, their behavior appears relatively adaptive and civilized. Is that partly due to this above function of witnessing and performing a sacrifice?

Other issues are brought up by the group-fantasy that the world is just.

1. In what ways does a natural disaster differently impact a victim as compared to a man-made one? Levi (1988) cites J. Amery, a survivor who had been a French partisan captured and interrogated by the Gestapo. Amery, a philosopher, described the sudden transformation in his view of the world with the first blow to his face followed by torture: it forever changed the contract that he understood he had with humankind. Amery states:

Anyone who has been tortured remains tortured - Anyone who has suffered torture never again will be at ease in the world, the abomination of the annihilation is never extinguished. Faith in humanity, already cracked by the first slap in the face, then demolished by torture, is never acquired again (cited by Levi, p. 25).

Amery committed suicide in 1978.

2. The effort by religious persons to understand the role of God in a catastrophe is poignant. Repeatedly they ponder such ideas as: if God is all-powerful, then how could He allow this to happen; His ways are mysterious or He tests the suffering ones and/or transmutes their character for the better by the trial, or perhaps selfishly wants the deceased person, often a child or young adult, at His side; or maybe He has evil aspects (a group of death camp prisoners held a trial that found God guilty for allowing this immolation of Jews); possibly, however, He is not omnipotent, but rather is virtuous and compassionate; He weeps for the victim, offers solace; nevertheless He does not have the capability of altering events.

3. A myriad of individuals ranging from borderline to criminal with harsh, depriving childhoods as well as normal individuals exposed to calamity openly voice that the world is unfair. Proud of their enlightenment, some take pleasure promulgating this message, e.g., the bumper sticker: "Life is a bitch, and then you're dead" or the popular German riddle: "How is life like a chicken coop ladder?" Answer: "Short and shitty" (Dunces, 1984).

Some persons in this category appear to use the bad internal object as a holding environment: the bad object becomes a background figure used for refueling by the host, approving illicit behavior by the host, reaffirming the host's entitlements. The medieval depictions of diabolists adulating, identifying with, and ecstatically submitting to the Devil offer some models of this relationship.

4. Influencing the perception of the world's justness are constant transactions between the individual's internal and external world. Plainly, such fluctuations cannot be picked up by a paper and pencil test administered one time, usually in an academic setting among fellow students all concerned with the representation of the self as an upright young lady.

The infant tends to internalize the mirroring and/or idealized significant other, thus possessing good objects inside and attempting to assimilate them into his psychic structure. But still resorting to splitting to remove dangerous aspects of objects, he then projects the bad into the outside world. Although he proceeds developmentally to integrate good and bad representations of objects, these archaic structures and happenings continue on deeper levels, sporadically shading the adult's world with darker hues. When the bad object is internalized, it may fear losing the host should the latter see the world as having any redeeming attributes; out of loyalty, the host defines the outside world as jaundiced. Should the cosmos be regarded as benign, the person may be alarmed by his desire to merge with and lose himself in it. The concept of a just world may be a manic defense against facing disappointment, regret, loss, loneliness, and correspondingly bleak environs. But these underlying affects may periodically flare up, undoing the idealization of the world. A related instance is that there is the all-too-universal primitive self-structure that demands victims in order to stabilize itself, that obtains entitlements by imperiously erasing any caring person from its history. When activated, this malignant self is accompanied by the self-exonerating labeling of the world as unjust.

5. Following Bion (1957), Grotstein (1981) has set forth a dual track model of mental functioning: experiences are formed from the overlapping perceptions of the ego's subsectors, each an active psychic agency capable of awareness of self, thinking, and feeling. Accordingly, experiences of the world are generally based on a partial integration of two or more psychic structures with perhaps dissimilar cognitive styles. It is analogous to binocularity with eyes of unlike capacities presenting two sets of stimuli to the mind. The mind draws on the messages from the eye better suited to the immediate situation; the partly suppressed message may be used to add nuance. This concept of the building blocks of an experience and the flexibly shifting dominance of the underlying structures supplements Lerner's statements of the usual two distinct levels of assessing the world's justness.

Discrete ego subsectors may be seen as employed in every appraisal, although differentially, at times dialectically. Optimally, each assessment should be considerably evolved and on tap to assist a sophisticated adaptation to one's circumstances. For instance, should an adult suffer a calamity, ideally, after that inevitable period of shock, there should be at hand for coping a subsystem of clear reasoning about being ill-starred; this subsystem is modulated both by the other system that declares the world is largely just, as well as by the immediate circumstances. An evolved dual track would enable the person to apply himself with confidence that effort will likely bring reward, to process a misfortune more resiliently, and to curb the temptation to reproach victims for their afflictions.

I trust that this essay demonstrates that benign, thought-provoking exchanges may take place between social psychology and psychohistory.

Stanley Rosenman, Ph.D., 55 E. 86th Street, New York, NY 10028, is a practicing psychoanalyst and Contributing Editor to this journal.

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