Investment in Long-Term Goals and Commitment to Just Means Drive the Need to Believe in a Just World

Abstract

The author hypothesized that the less one focuses on long-term goals, or the less one plans to achieve goals through just means, the less essential is the belief in a just world (BJW) and the less one will work at maintaining this belief when it is threatened. In Studies 1 and 2, participants’ focus on long-term investments was either manipulated or measured, and their reactions to a victim who presented a high or low threat to the BJW were assessed. In Study 2, the tendency to obtain goals through unjust means (delinquency) also was measured. As predicted, strong long-term focus and low-delinquency participants reacted more negatively toward the high-threat victim, presumably to maintain the BJW. Study 3 showed that the more one focuses on long-term investments and the less one uses unjust means, the stronger one’s BJW.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 251 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.