Michèlle Bal

Blaming for a Better Future: Future Orientation and Associated Intolerance of Personal Uncertainty Lead to Harsher Reactions Toward Innocent Victims

People are often encouraged to focus on the future and strive for long-term goals. This noted, the authors argue that this future orientation is associated with intolerance of personal uncertainty, as people usually cannot be certain that their efforts will pay off. To be able to tolerate personal uncertainty, people adhere strongly to the belief in a just world, paradoxically resulting in harsher reactions toward innocent victims. In three experiments, the authors show that a future orientation indeed leads to more negative evaluations of an innocent victim (Study 1), enhances intolerance of personal uncertainty (Study 2), and that experiencing personal uncertainty leads to more negative evaluations of a victim (Study 3). So, while a future orientation enables people to strive for long-term goals, it also leads them to be harsher toward innocent victims. One underlying mechanism causing these reactions is intolerance of personal uncertainty, associated with a future orientation.

Effects of Lay Beliefs on the Justice Motive

Justice is one of the central values in people’s lives. Being treated fairly and treating each other with respect are important principles for many. Yet, in everyday life people are confronted with injustice and innocent victims on a regular basis. Reactions toward victims can range from going to great lengths to help or support the victims to harsh negative reactions often resulting in blaming victims for what happened to them. This chapter describes how lay theories of justice influence our responses toward victims in particular and social justice in general. We review a range of both negative reactions, such as victim blaming, and positive reactions, such as helping and immanent justice reasoning, and discuss important psychological processes underlying these reactions.

Over waargenomen onrechtvaardigheid en radicalisering

The authors propose that perceptions of injustice play a central role in radicalization toward violent extremism and terrorism. Perceptions of unfair disadvantage in comparison with other groups (horizontal deprivation) or by societal authorities (vertical deprivation) will elicit strong emotional and behavioral reactions. In combination with feelings of personal uncertainty and a lack of cognitive capacities to control justice-related emotions, this increases the pull and attraction of radical ideologies. Furthermore, when people join a radical organization, a vicious circle of identification with and justification of radical ideology and illegitimization and rejection of the status quo follow, possibly resulting in the justification of violence to achieve social change. Injustice perceptions are difficult to change, but a better understanding of the basic processes involved allows for the development of prevention and deradicalization programs, which should focus on full and just societal integration of groups and individuals that have a high potential to radicalize.

Social-Cognitive and Motivational Processes Underlying the Justice Motive

This chapter studies psychological processes that may underlie people’s justice concerns. The psychological processes the chapter examines include both social-cognitive and motivational processes. In particular, the chapter discusses a two-phase model of self-interest and justice concerns, rationalistic and experiential paths to blaming of innocent victims and their relationship with explicit just-world beliefs, future orientation and coping with personal uncertainty, and self-regulatory processes pertaining to the just-world motive. The chapter closes by discussing some issues pertaining to the modern, scientific study of the justice motive. In discussing these conceptual and methodological issues pertaining to justice concerns, the current chapter builds on and hopes to extend the groundbreaking work on the justice motive by Lerner and others. The psychological processes studied in this chapter may contribute to the process-oriented study of the psychology of the justice motive.