Cindel White, associate professor in the Department of Psychology at York University, and her team wanted to understand what motivates our karmic beliefs. Their hypothesis? The need for justice leads us to think that others deserve their misfortunes, while the desire to see ourselves as a good person leads us to perceive our victories as deserved. A reading grid that flatters our ego while comforting us in the idea that order reigns.
Tell about a karmic event!
To test this idea, the researchers carried out several experiments involving more than 2,000 participants. In the first, 478 Americans who believed in karma were asked to recount a karmic event experienced by themselves or someone else. The vast majority (86%) chose to talk about a personal experience, and among them, 59% mentioned a positive event linked, in their opinion, to a good deed. In contrast, among those who told the story of another person, 92% talked about a negative event.
A second experiment brought together more than 1,200 participants from the United States, India and Singapore. They too had to write about a personal or someone else’s karmic experience. Here again, the figures speak for themselves: 69% of people who spoke about themselves described a positive episode, compared to only 18% of those talking about another person. Even the vocabulary used was more positive in the personal stories.
Karma, a distorting mirror of reality
The researchers note that this effect is less marked among Indian and Singaporean participants. A difference that they believe reflects a lower prevalence of self-enhancement bias in these cultures. “The positive bias in karmic self-perceptions is somewhat lower in the Indian and Singaporean samples compared to the U.S. samples, but across all countries, participants were significantly more likely to say that others experience karmic punishments while they themselves receive karmic rewards“, explains Cindel White in a press release.
Clearly, this study shows how supernatural beliefs can be used strategically. “Thinking about karma allows individuals to recognize some responsibility and feel pride in the positive events that happen to them, even when it is not clear what exactly they did to produce that favorable outcome.“, says Ms. White. “But it also allows people to see the suffering of others as justified. This meets various personal needs: seeing oneself as a good person deserving of happiness, and perceiving a form of justice in the suffering of others“.
But if karma comforts us, it also acts as a mirror of our biases. By believing that our happiness is deserved while the misfortunes of others are the consequence of their actions, we nourish a vision of the world that is reassuring, but sometimes blind to injustice. A way of believing that says a lot about our need for order and merit in a world where chance remains difficult to accept.