The Influence Of Economic Condition On The Activation Of The Right World Faith

People need to believe that the world is a just place, a place where individuals get what they deserve. When their belief in a just world is threatened by the presence of innocent suffering, people will be motivated to preserve the belief by a number of strategies, because such a belief makes people feel save and believe they would be treated fairly. There is a social phenomenon called hatred for wealth in China. Actually, the hatred is not really for the wealth, it’s for the injustice that wealth or the rich people represents. The concept of rich people or the wealth maybe has been linked to the idea of injustice for some rich one did a lot of unfair things to other people. But there is still no empirical research that can prove it.A review was presented from the aspects of structure, scales, function and the research trend of the belief in a just world in this paper. Two experiments were designed to verify the relationship between "rich" and "injustice". In both experiments, participants read a paragraph and then performed a modified Stroop task.The first study was designed to explore the impact of the rich/poor innocent victim on threat to the belief in a just world. Results showed that after being confronted with an innocent victim, participants took more time to identify the color of words related to justice than neutral words, which means their belief in a just world is threatened. But there is no significant difference of the time to identify the color of words related to justice between the participants confronted the poor victim or the rich victim.The second study was designed to test whether the clues of financial situation of someone in an accident which we don’t know who is the perpetrator would make different effects on the belief in just world. Results showed that a higher latency for words related to justice than neutral words only in the condition that there is a rich one, which means the clue of "rich" active the belief in just world.Now we know that the financial situation of someone in an accident do make different effects on the belief in just world. But whether the financial situation of the innocent victim would make different effects is still unsure.