Melvin J. Lerner

You can know all of the red flags in the world and still find yourself in a situation that you never imagined yourself to be in.

There is another, um, let me just call it what? A psychological idea that I find very interesting, and it's called the just world hypothesis, right? There's a psychologist called Melvin, Melvin Lerner, and he studied how people can be motivated to believe that the world is fundamentally fair, that good things happen to good people, and that people who experience negative outcomes must somehow have done something to deserve them.

I feel like religion doesn't help with the situation.

[laughs] Anyway And we know the world doesn't work that way, but believing that it does can give us this sense of security because if bad things only happen to people who make bad decisions, then surely all I have to do is make good decisions and I'm gonna be good.

This is the idea that we exist in a world where good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people, and so all people get what they deserve.

Beginning in the 1960s, psychologist Melvin Lerner became interested in the phenomenon of victims being blamed for the injustices that happened to them, what we now just call victim blaming.

But this eventually evolved into his work on what is known as just world belief or just world fallacy, because of course the world isn't fair or just.

It shouldn't be surprising that while this belief is actually pretty universal, it is more popular with the Republican or conservative voters.

You know, one thing I'm thinking about here is, is the concept of, um, a just world.

Uh, this is described by the psychologist Melvin Lerner, for example, and he theorized that people have a deep-seated need to believe that the world is fair, that life gives you what you deserve, and in some ways this might be a defense mechanism.

You know, this terrible thing happened to Kate because somehow she deserved it, but I don't deserve something like this, so it won't happen to me.

Mm-hmm.

Spirituality, on the other hand, is rooted in faith.

It requires a belief in the supernatural.

At Columbia University, psychologist Lisa Miller seeks to bridge that gap.

She studies spirituality and transcendence from a scientific perspective.