Self-other Overlap Within The Belief In A Just World

Individuals are motivated to believe in a just world where they get what they deserve and deserve what they get. Functioning as a "fundamental delusion", such belief has influence on micro factors within individual such as trust, effort, risky behavior, personality and subjective well-being, meanwhile it is also related with macro factors between individuals (say, system justification), which makes it become a concept with explanatory power. In this paper, questions concerning the essential attribution of the belief in a just world---deserve---are put forwards as follows:Within the just world belief, does the operation rules of just world vary according to the degree of overlap between the subject of deserveness and the subject of belief? If so, such variances are universal beyond culture and can be measured vie scale?In study1,118Chinese students were required to make subjective judgment based on two different stories of various heroes they had read. One story was about suffering undeserved punishment, and the other with respect to escaping deserved punishment. Various heroes included stranger, close other, and subjects themselves. The first question was about to what degree they think the stories were acceptable, and the other two were about when and how much the hero would be compensated or fined. In study2,42foreign students repeated the experiment of study1. In study3, complied belief in a just world concerning close others (COBJW) scale, general-personal belief in a just world (GBJW, PBJW)scale and the index of well-being scale were applied to compare the mean scores of different scales and explore the relationship among them. After analyzing the data collected from255college students (205from China, and50from America and Europe), conclusions show as below:Everyone should be treated justly, while the word is more just for close others and me than generally; The closer the other is, the more favoritism judgments subjects may make; such favoritism for close others is universal beyond cultures. The COBJW scale has acceptable reliability and validity. Participants from both individualism and collectivism culture get significant higher item mean scores on COBJW than on GBJW and PBJW. COBJW is related with index of subjective-welling significantly, especially in Chinese students.