Study finds self-serving twist to belief in divine justice

Many people around the world believe in karma—that idea that divine justice will punish people who do bad deeds and reward those who do good. But that belief plays out differently for oneself versus others, according to research published in Psychology of Religion and Spirituality titled “Karma rewards me and punishes you: Self-other divergences in karma beliefs.”

People are more likely to believe that they’ve earned good things in their own life through karmic merit, while bad things that happen to other people are due to karmic punishment, according to the study.

Cindel White, Ph.D., of York University, and her colleagues wanted to explore how people’s psychological motivations drive beliefs about karma.

The researchers hypothesized that our desire to believe in a just world—one where bad deeds are punished—pushes us to focus on karmic punishment when thinking about how karma affects other people. However, a competing psychological motivation—self-positivity bias, or the desire to see ourselves as good people—means that we are more likely to focus on evidence of good karma in our own lives.

To test this, the researchers conducted several experiments with more than 2,000 total participants, in which they asked people to recall and write about karmic events in their own life or in the lives of others.

In the first study, the researchers analyzed data from 478 participants in the U.S., all of whom indicated that they believed in karma. The participants came from a mix of religious backgrounds—29% were Christian, 30% Buddhist, 22% Hindu, 4% other religions and 15% non-religious.

Participants were instructed to write about a karmic event that had happened to themselves or to someone else. Trained coders then evaluated each response to determine whether it was about a positive or a negative karmic event, and whether it happened to the participant or someone else.

Overall, most participants (86%) chose to write about something that had happened to themselves. The majority of those (59%) wrote about a positive experience that was due to good karma. In contrast, of the 14% of participants who wrote about a karmic experience that happened to another person, 92% wrote about something negative.

In a second experiment, more than 1,200 participants were randomly assigned to write about either something that happened to themselves or to someone else. This experiment included participants in the U.S. as well as a sample of Buddhists in Singapore and Hindus in India.

Overall, 69% of the participants who were assigned to write about themselves wrote about a positive karmic experience, while only 18% of those assigned to write about someone else wrote about a positive experience.

A computer analysis of the sentiment of the words that participants used also found that the stories were more likely to have a positive sentiment when people were writing about karmic events in their own lives.

However, these differences were slightly weaker among Indian and Singaporean participants compared with U.S. participants. That’s consistent with evidence from previous research that self-positivity bias is less prevalent in those cultures than in the U.S., according to White.

“We found very similar patterns across multiple cultural contexts, including Western samples, where we know people often think about themselves in exaggeratedly positive ways, and samples from Asian countries where people are more likely to be self-critical,” White said.

“The positive bias in karmic self-perceptions is a bit weaker in the Indian and Singaporean samples compared with U.S. samples, but across all countries, participants were much more likely to say that other people face karmic punishments while they receive karmic rewards.”

Overall, White said, the research shows how people apply supernatural beliefs strategically to help them make sense of and feel good about experiences in their everyday life.

“Thinking about karma allows people to take personal credit and feel pride in good things that happen to them even when it isn’t clear exactly what they did to create the good outcome, but it also allows people to see other people’s suffering as justified retribution,” she said.

“This satisfies various personal motives—to see oneself as good and deserving of good fortune, and to see justice in other people’s suffering—and supernatural beliefs like karma might be especially good at satisfying these motives when other, more secular explanations fail.”