The Effect Of The Just World Belief On Helping Behavior

The core of the belief in a just world theory is: “it is believed that the world is a just place to live in. In this world, good people get reward and bad people are punished. All people can get what they deserve.” As an expected good moral behavior, helping behavior refers to caring for others and providing help voluntarily. If people have the just world belief, they will tend to offer help when others in need. However, there were so many news reports like “little Yueyue incident”, prompting people to think about the reasons behind the similar social phenomenon. Previous researches had begun to explore the relationship between the BJW and helping behavior, but the content was relatively thin and method was unitary. There are so many unknown problems need further research.This Research conducted three studies to explore the effect of the BJW on helping behavior. The first study used the explicit and implicit method to measure the BJW, to explore the present situation of college students’ explicit and implicit BJW and the effect of the explicit and implicit BJW on helping behavior. The second study focused on the perspective of the situation characteristic, aiming to explore the effect of the situation characteristic on helping behavior and the role of BJW in the relationship of situation characteristic and helping behavior. The third study focused on the perspective of recipient characteristic, aiming to explore the BJW on helping behavior to the recipients with different ages and different economic conditions.The conclusions are as follows:(1) The explicit BJW for self is significantly related to helping behavior and can effectively predict helping behavior. However, explicit BJW for others has no significant relationship with helping behavior. Implicit BJW for self and others both have nothing to do with helping behavior.(2) The helping behavior is influenced by the situation characteristic. College students’ helping behavior level is higher in the unfair situation priming conditions. The effects of situation characteristic and explicit BJW for self on helping behavior are relatively independent.(3) The helping behavior is influenced by recipients’ economic conditions, college students are more inclined to help the poor rather than the rich. Explicit BJW for self can affect helping behavior, college students with high BJW show more helping behavior to recipients in different scenarios than students with low BJW. College students with different levels of BJW are different in helping recipients with different ages. The helping behavior has no difference for college students with high BJW, but students with low BJW are more inclined to help the old.