What Goes Around Comes Around: The Evolutionary Roots of the Belief in Immanent Justice
Open accessAbstract
The belief in immanent justice is the expectation that the universe is designed to ensure that evil is punished and virtue rewarded. What makes this belief so ‘natural’? Here, we suggest that this intuition of immanent justice derives from our evolved sense of fairness. In cases where a misdeed is followed by a misfortune, our sense of fairness construes the misfortune as a way to compensate for the misdeed. To test this hypothesis, we designed a set of studies in which we show that people who do not believe in immanent justice are nonetheless implicitly influenced by intuitions of immanent justice. Strikingly, this effect disappears when the misfortune is disproportionate compared to the misdeed: In this case, justice is not restored and participants lose the intuition of immanent justice. Following recent theories of religion, we suggest that this intuition contributes to the cultural success of beliefs in immanent justice.
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Individual differences in belief in karma and belief in a just world are only moderately correlated.
“Beliefs about karma may partly reflect intuitions about fairness that arise from general belief in a just world (Baumard & Chevallier, 2012), but individual differences in belief in karma and belief in a just world are only moderately correlated (Chobthamkit et al., 2022;White, Norenzayan, et al., 2019), and explicit belief in karma is also shaped by particular religious cultures and cognitive”
From Victim blaming and belief in karma (2024) · cites this paper as Baumard & Chevallier, 2012
Baumard and Chevallier are cited for the sentence’s first clause, not for the moderate correlation, which is attributed to Chobthamkit et al. and White et al. The Introduction links intuitions of immanent justice to a sense of fairness, and the later discussion identifies karma as a belief with that moral content. Our copy does not establish that those intuitions arise from a general belief in a just world. (LLM, conf=0.80)
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Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion
McCutcheon, R. T., & Guthrie, S. E. (1994) · Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion · doi:10.2307/1386639 · Cited by 200 · cited 2× · see citing works
“For instance, beliefs in the existence of supernatural agents catch on very easily because they activate a set of cognitive mechanisms specialized in face detection (Guthrie, 1993), agency detection (J.”
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Norenzayan, A., Shariff, A. F., Gervais, W. M., Willard, A. K., McNamara, R. A., Slingerland, E., & Henrich, J. (2016) · Behavioral and Brain Sciences · doi:10.1017/s0140525x15000655 · Cited by 58 · see citing works
White, C. J. M., & Norenzayan, A. (2019) · Advances in Experimental Social Psychology · doi:10.1016/bs.aesp.2019.03.001 · Cited by 54 · see citing works
Victim blaming and belief in karma
White, C. J. M., & Willard, A. K. (2024) · Asian Journal of Social Psychology · doi:10.1111/ajsp.12654 · Cited by 4 · see citing works
- Authors
- Baumard, N., & Chevallier, C.
- Affiliations
- University of Pennsylvania (US)
- Venue
- Journal of Cognition and Culture
- Publisher
- Walter de Gruyter GmbH
- Published
- 2012-01-01
- Volume
- 12
- Issue
- 1-2
- Pages
- 67-80
- ISSN
- 1567-7095 (ISSN-L)
- 1568-5373
- OpenAlex
- W1991563772
- Cited by
- 46
- References
- 2
- Citations by year
- 2026: 1 · 2025: 4 · 2024: 4 · 2023: 1 · 2022: 3 · 2021: 6 · 2020: 7 · 2019: 5 · 2018: 1 · 2017: 2 · 2016: 3 · 2015: 2 · 2014: 4 · 2013: 3
- FWCI
- 1.47
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- repository.upenn.edu
- Locations
- Journal of Cognition and Culture (publishedVersion)
- Scholarly Commons (University of Pennsylvania) (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Philosophy › Theology and Philosophy of Evil
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation
- Keywords
- immanent justice, sense of fairness, evolutionary psychology, reward and punishment, misfortune, implicit beliefs, moral intuitions, proportionality
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