17 - Just Punishments: Research on Retributional Justice

Summary

Famously, Lerner postulated that people have a belief in a just world. One expression of this belief is “what people get is what they deserve in life.” I can still remember the excitement generated by his first set of experiments, which demonstrated that, if one saw a person getting a negative set of outcomes, one came to believe that there was something in the person's character or prior actions that in some sense caused the person to deserve those negative outcomes. To paraphrase, if bad things happened to a person, that person was somehow a bad person who deserved those outcomes. So the belief in a just world creates an inference warrant: if the world is such that people get what they deserve, then if they get a positive or a negative outcome, they must have deserved it. In calling attention to justice and just worlds, Lerner called social psychology's attention to a large array of issues that had not received much attention in the psychology of the day. Many of those issues Lerner addressed in his own sustained and systematic research program; he encouraged the consideration of other issues in the justice arena by his equally sustained and generous efforts to create resources and publication outlets that would allow others to create theory and do research in the field as well. Lerner's leadership role is one for which we all can be grateful.