Just-World Beliefs Increase Helping Intentions via Meaning and Affect
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Just‑World Beliefs Increase Helping Intentions via Meaning and Affect Eric R. Igou1 · Aidan A. Blake1 · Herbert Bless2 Accepted: 23 September 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Our research examines the relationship between just-world beliefs and helping. Specifically, we pose that the belief in just world increases helping intentions via perceptions of meaning in life. Consistently, across two studies we found that higher levels of just-world beliefs corresponded with stronger helping intentions. In Study 1, individual differences in just-world beliefs correlated positively with helping intentions. In Study 2, experimentally induced higher (vs. lower) levels of just-world beliefs led to stronger intentions to help others. In both studies, we found that the presence of meaning in life mediated the effects of just-world beliefs on helping intentions, indicating that these prosocial effects of just-world beliefs are established through the impression that life is meaningful. We further found that positive affect plays a mediational role in these effects by linking the perceptions of meaning to helping intentions. This research provides insights into the socially desirable consequences of just-world beliefs by highlighting the crucial roles of existential appraisals and affective states. Keywords Just-world beliefs · Helping · Prosocial behavior · Meaning · Positive affect
1 Introduction Justice seems important to people. This is, for example, reflected in written history and everyday-news reports on people’s experiences of injustice and efforts to overcome it, either individually or socially. Next to injustice, there are, of course, instances where justice is well served, for example, in judicial decisions or personal achievements. It is technically and psychologically nearly impossible to assess the number of instances serving justice and injustice and their relative frequencies. However, what do people think? Literature suggests that people and groups hold beliefs that the world in which they live is overall just Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s1090 2-020-00317-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Eric R. Igou [email protected] 1
Department of Psychology, University of Limerick, Limerick, Republic of Ireland
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Mikrosoziologie und Sozialpsychologie, University of Mannheim, 68161 Mannheim, Germany
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and that these beliefs are rooted in and upheld by people’s need to hold such views (Lerner 1980; Lerner and Miller 1978). People with strong beliefs in a just world engage in motivated cognitive strategies and behavior that match and uphold this worldview, even when faced with injustices (Lerner 1980; Lerner and Simmons 1966; Rubin and Peplau 1975). Our research examines one very important positive consequence of just-world beliefs for society, namely the intention to help others, and the crucial roles that appraisals of life’s meaning and affective states
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