The Effects Of BJW Motive, Victim's Innocence And Severity Of Harm On Judgments Of Causal Irrelevance Traits

Facing with victims suffering from miseries, people should sympathize and have the responsibility to help them, which are encouraged by our social norms. In fact, however, it are generally be conjectured that victims have bad moral character instead of to help them. In order to explain the reason of such abnormal behaviors, Lerner and his colleagues put forward a famous theory- Belief in a Just Word (BJW). And they held that such behaviors were caused by people's desire to living in a just world. This article is composed of three major parts:To begin with, researches concerned are introduced. Basing on the introduction, the focus of this article, is complementary justice an effective tactic to cope with injustice, is born.In the second part, two experiences were designed. And in the first experience, post-conscious priming program was administrated to activated subjects BJW motive, and what's more, victim's innocence was operated. The result shows that the interaction between BJW motive and victim's innocence reaches a significant level, which is not consistent with Kay et al's idea. The second experience was conceived in order to illuminate such inconsistency. Based on the first experience, in the second experience, serious harm as an independent variable was added. The result shows that the interaction among BJW motive, victim's innocence and serious harm reaches a marginally significant level.Last, conclusion and prospect. From study of this article, we may draw the conclusion that complementary justice may be right under some circumstance, and subjects facing with high BJW threat and administrated description of a person with serious harm assessed less enhancement on causal irrelevance traits (causal relevance and causal irrelevance traits) than subjects facing with low BJW threat; subjects facing with high BJW threat and administrated description of a person with slight harm assessed more enhancement on causal irrelevance traits (for example smart) than subjects facing with low BJW threat. Finally, there still leave something to be desire, for instance, conceiving new method to enhance research effect and the classifying of different traits.