The Justice Fallacy

Let's talk about victim blaming. One potential explanation for victim blaming is the just world hypothesis. According to the just world hypothesis, people tend to believe that “we deserve what we get” and “get what we deserve” in life, which leads people to blame many victims for their suffering (Lerner, 1980).  In order to not feel threatened when bad things happen, people have to believe that the victim deserved it in some way. In other words, if bad things can happen to good people, everyone is in danger and most people cannot bear this thought.

Although I can understand the just world hypothesis on an intellectual level, I fail to understand why any individual could hold a belief in a just world. In the small town I grew up in, there were reminders of the injustice so characteristic of life everywhere I went. My mother used to work for an alternative school of choice that provided an opportunity for people who would otherwise be unable to finish high school to get their diploma. One of her first and favorite students was all set to graduate in a few months and had recently been engaged. One Friday, my mom excitedly informed me how proud she was that he had finally reconciled with his estranged father. Two days later, my mom informed me with a stony face that this student of hers had been shot and killed. Neighbors had seen another teenager come running out of his house covered in blood, and police expected to find him soon although he was in hiding. She wanted the news not to come as a surprise to me if other students were talking about the tragedy the next morning.

In actuality, what surprised me the next morning was how the students were acting. No one could accept the idea that he had been shot in his own home by one of his friends. The concept was just too frightening. People started saying it must have been his own fault, that he probably committed suicide. When that explanation wasn’t plausible enough, a new rumor started that he had been playing Russian roulette. I heard people who had never known him degrade and berate what remained of his reputation to make themselves feel less afraid, even though from the entrance wound there was no way he could have shot himself. The killer later wrote a confession letter to the victim’s parents, and even then the cops didn’t arrest him. The idea that my mom’s student had somehow brought this on himself had become prevalent amongst the cops too, despite all of the evidence. The police listed his death as a suicide, and I spent the rest of the year sitting across from the killer in one of my classes.

There’s no such thing as a just world folks. Feel lucky your life isn’t worse and just deal with it.

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Lerner, M. J. (1980). The belief in a just world: A fundamental delusion. New York:

Plenum.

Easy Isn't Always Best

Imagine you are a physician at a successful medical practice. You have appointments booked back to back every day, and in order to keep on schedule you can spend no more than 15 minutes examining any one patient. You’re running late on this particular day and are in a hurry to get through your next appointment. You listen to a robust, young man describe his headaches. You quickly but politely inform him that his symptoms are common and he has nothing to worry about. You hurry to your next appointment, and do not learn until weeks later that the patient was hospitalized for a malignant brain tumor you had missed.

Why might the doctor have missed this diagnosis, despite his or her years of medical training and experience? When under stress, cognitive loading, or time constrictions, many of us utilize mental shortcuts called cognitive heuristics that can quickly and easily lead us to conclusions (Gilovich et al., 2002; Kahneman et al., 1982; Nisbett & Ross, 1980). Unfortunately, the conclusions formed based on cognitive heuristics can potentially be wildly inaccurate.

Like the fictional young man mentioned above, I too have experienced firsthand the effects of doctors using cognitive heuristics. At 15, I began to experience excruciating pain that would migrate throughout my body constantly. Every single doctor I saw to try to find an explanation would look at my chart, see my age, gender, and history of major depressive disorder and immediately inform me that untreated depression can sometimes cause physical pain. I went back on my antidepressants to rule that possibility out, but each new doctor would see the prescription on my chart as a confirmation of their original hunch that the root of the problem was ‘psychological, not biological.’ Five years later, I was finally diagnosed with a central nervous system infection. If the doctors had diagnosed me when I first sought medical help, I would have been cured within a few months with minimal permanent damage. Now, however, there’s absolutely no question that I will have permanent brain, nerve, and organ damage (likely to each of my organ systems), and cognitive function tests show that I’m mildly to severely impaired in all areas except reasoning. Treatment itself is also now a danger because of my sever immunosuppression, and I have already had life threatening complications.

Aside from the life threatening health issues, what do my story and the young man’s above have in common? In both of our stories, the doctors judged the probability that we would be seriously ill based on our affiliation with certain categories. The man was young and robust, both attributes you would normally not associate with a cancer patient. I, on the other hand, was a young, female patient with a history of mental illness, AKA the stereotypical patient to develop a psychosomatic disorder. The bottom line: doctors need to be especially wary of mental shortcuts, because an inaccurate cognitive heuristic can mean the difference between a simple mistake and a malpractice lawsuit.

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Gilovich, T., Griffin, D., & Kahneman, D. (Eds.). (2002). Heuristics and biases: The

psychology of intuitive judgment. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Kahneman, D., Slovic, P., & Tversky, A. (Eds.). (1982). Judgment under uncertainty:

Heuristics and biases. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Nisbett, R. E., & Ross, L. (1980). Human inference: Strategies and shortcomings of

social judgment. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Brother Trouble or Troubled Brother?

Like so many teenage boys, my brother can be a real idiot. Although he was much smarter than average, he refused to ever study or do his homework. My brother was always much more interested in drinking, drugs and partying than academics. Jokingly, he used to say that even stoned out of his mind during the SAT he still scored higher than the rest of his friends. In the rare instances when he was challenged enough to fail a test, he would blame the drugs or say he didn’t care enough to try. All in all, my brother seemed like a classic (yet still brilliant) self-handicapper.

Self-handicapping is a term used by social psychologists to describe instances in which people create obstacles to their own success in order to give themselves an excuse for failure (Berglas & Jones, 1978). Common methods of self-handicapping include drinking or doing drugs, making excuses, not studying and procrastination (Ferrari, 1998; Higgins & Harris, 1988; Hirt et al., 1991). Any of us who have experienced the crushing disappointment of failure can sympathize with the desire to avoid failure. Admittedly, chronic self-handicappers take this aversion too far, and in avoiding taking responsibility for failure they also avoid the pleasure that can accompany a hard-won success.

Before any of you readers begin to judge self-handicappers too harshly, let’s take another look at the example of my brother. After my brother was put on probation for drug possession and could no longer self-medicate, he finally went to the doctor. X-rays showed that he had a number of congenital bone defects that had caused his bones to become brittle and break easily. Multiple bones in his feet and ankles had broken and healed wrong, causing him immense pain when he moved. In addition, two discs in his spinal column had herniated, resulting in crippling nerve pain when he would try to be still or move his body in certain directions. My brother had turned to drugs to blunt the pain but even with the drugs, the pain was still so severe that he had trouble concentrating or focusing on new information. He was acutely aware of these shortcomings, and after seeing his intellectual capabilities decline with no available diagnosis to explain why this was happening, he turned to self-handicapping tendencies to protect his ego. What had first seemed like a straightforward case of self-handicapping in fact was a psychological reaction to an undiagnosed handicap!

The moral of this story is that though we can identify self-handicapping behavior, we should not necessarily use this behavior to make generalized statements about that person’s character. The self-handicapper could be suffering from an undiagnosed learning disability, attention deficit disorder, a mental health condition or another serious health condition. We may be able to identify this particular behavior, but we can’t ascertain at a glance why it occurs.

In other words, I can call my brother an idiot but you sure as hell can’t!

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Berglas, S., & Jones, E. E. (1978). Drug choice as a self-handicapping strategy in

response to noncontingent success. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 36, 405–417.

Ferrari, J. R. (1998). Procrastination. In H. S. Friedman (Ed.), Encyclopedia of mental

health (pp. 5.1–5.7). San Diego: Academic Press.

Higgins, R. L., & Harris, R. N. (1988). Strategic “alcohol” use: Drinking to self-

handicap. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 6, 191–202.

Hirt, E. R., Deppe, R. K., & Gordon, L. J. (1991). Self-reported versus behavioral self-

handicapping: Empirical evidence for a theoretical distinction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 61, 981–991.