Belief in a Just World
Belief in a just world is the working assumption that people broadly get what they deserve and deserve what they get, held as a picture of how the world operates rather than as a philosophical position. Its familiar face is victim-blaming, because if outcomes are deserved then misfortune says something about the person it happened to. Its less familiar face is that the same belief works as a coping resource, making effort feel worth making and the future feel navigable. The construct is Melvin Lerner's. Both faces are well attested and the popular account this vault holds cites nothing for either.
What it is
Lerner created the construct, and the secondary source this page is written from names him neither in its prose nor in its bibliography. Not misattributed, not mentioned in passing, not relegated to a reading list. Absent from both. The identification of Lerner here is this publication's, not the book's.
The literature has two phases, and the useful part of the popular account is its description of the turn between them. Early work cast just-world believers as both credulous about how the world works and morally suspect for what the belief licenses them to think about victims. Adrian Furnham's review of the literature is the source for that reading of the early phase. The modern turn, which he dates loosely to around the turn of the millennium, treats the belief as a healthy coping mechanism that buffers stress and supports achievement. On that reading the belief is doing psychological work for the person holding it, whatever it does to the people they judge.