Just-world Phenomenon

There are people in this world that believe in the just-world phenomenon. The just-world phenomenon is described by Myers (2013) to be “the tendency of people to believe that the world is just and that people therefore get what they deserve and deserve what they get” (p. 342).  People believe that people get whatever they deserve to get.  If people have misfortune then they must have done something wrong in order to deserve that misfortune.  This also contributes to societies that do not change and advance.  If people have the mindset that things have been done a particular way for years, then it is just the way it is. Inflexibility of this kind of thinking inhibits necessary change in this ever changing world.

One very controversial topic that fits the just-world phenomenon would be the death penalty. In some states in the United States the death penalty is not only legal but it is still used.  As the Death Penalty Information Center (2014) stated “the first established death penalty laws date as far back as the Eighteenth Century B.C. in the Code of King Hammaurabi of Babylon, which codified the death penalty for 25 different crimes” (para.1).  Through the years the uses of the death penalty changed in different ways it was carried out and what the crime committed was. The Death Penalty Information Center (2014) noted that in the United States “the first recorded execution in the new colonies was that of Captain George Kendall in the Jamestown colony of Virginia in 1608” (The Death Penalty in America, para. 1) for being a spy.  These days capital punishment is still legal in some states but there are laws regulating its use.  The death penalty is used for capital crimes such as murder and a jury usually decides whether the person gets the death penalty or a lesser sentence of life in prison.

I believe the death penalty exemplifies the idea of the just-world phenomenon. When talking about the just-world phenomenon, people believe that people get what they deserve.  In the case of the death penalty people who support it generally believe that if someone kills someone then they deserve to die also. In this phenomenon there is no room for change, so what has been done for centuries still plays a role in our society today.

References

Death Penalty Information Center (2014). Part I: History of the death penalty. Retrieved from http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/part-i-history-death-penalty

Myers, D. (2013).  Social Psychology (11^th ed.).  New York: McGraw Hill.