Why We Think We Deserve Good Karma—And Others Don’t

andOr thousands of years, people have waited for vine to catch up with their good behavior – or promised that he would wander to anyone through them. The temptation of Karmi thinking is that if you do good things, the positive results will be presented to you, while the opposite is true for those who do not support the same level of morals. In other words, you reap what you grow.

“It is a fairly common belief – at least the general idea that there is a greater power outside humans, like the cosmic power that guarantees that good things in the long run, happen good things, and bad things for the bad,” says Sindel White, a professor of social and personal psychology in Toronto who has long studied Karma. Despite the fact that many people share a superficial belief system, researchers still do not know much about it, including “what this belief appears in their daily lives, how they feel about it, and how they think about it,” she says.

For this reason, in a A study published May 1 In the magazine Psychology of religion and spiritualityWhite and her colleagues have achieved how people’s psychological motives direct their beliefs about vine. They have found somewhat self -discrimination in how exactly these opinions appear: across the population, when people think about their vine, it tends to be very positive. But when they think about how the vine affect others? Well, we only say that there are many people coming.

Permanent clouds of karma

The concept of vine swinging in the global view of many Asian religious traditions, such as Hinduism and Buddhism, swings, but it is also prevalent in other places, including non -religious societies. In the past two years, the saturated pop culture was: Taylor Swift, Tanguel Rawan and Jojo Seoa, among other artists, all of whom released Karma songs. In the Swift tone, the good vine is compared to everything from her boyfriend to a cat roaming her lap because she loves her. “Karma is a comfortable idea,” It’s Crohn. “Do you not envy that for you not?”

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Cultural clouds towards divine justice are related to our desire to believe that moral behavior and mercy will be rewarded – meaning that we all have some influence on our destiny. “People want to feel fair,” said White. “They love this when people deal with each other fairly, and when they think they will go to the world in a predictable ways and people get what they deserve.” She adds that belief in vine can make other setbacks and challenges easier to tolerate, because at some point in the road, good behavior will definitely be rewarded.

“The vine and supernatural beliefs make you think there are higher powers that make sure you will get what you deserve in the long run,” said White. “It can make you feel optimistic and reassured, in the end, things will turn the best.”

Self -service perspective

In their new research, the White team conducted many experiences with more than 2000 people, who asked to write about the church events in their lives or the lives of others. Most people (86 %) chose writing about something that happened to themselves, and among these people, describing approximately 59 % positive experience – the result, as they believe, from vine. Choose a smaller choice of participants in the White Study (14 %) writing about something that happened to other people – and 92 % focused on a negative experience caused by bad Karma.

In another experience, people were told to write about something that either themselves or another person, in general, has focused 69 % of those who wrote about themselves on a positive Karmal experience, while 18 % of those appointed to write about another person focus on a positive experience. The ready -made meals were clear: the vine is good when we think about how it affects our lives, and badly when we think about how it affects others.

The results are strengthening the idea that we are all psychologically driven to understand ourselves as “virtuous and deserve good luck”, as the authors of the study said, “And to see others as receiving the sanctions only for their wrongful actions.”

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“People generally have motives to see themselves positively and think about all kinds of things in their lives in ways that put themselves in a positive light,” said White. “You can feel satisfied with yourself by thinking that you control the good things that happen to you, and you can feel confident in your future if you think you can do good things now to create yourself in the future.”

There will be some explanations for the reason for our focus on the krieum punishment when considering how the vine affect others. In part, we do not feel the strong need to display others positively. “There are a lot of reasons that you want to have more confidence in yourself by seeing yourself in a positive light, but we do not have the same motivation to focus on positive in the lives of others,” says White. She adds that explaining others’s negative experiences as a comic punishment that satisfies our motivation for justice – or the natural tendency to believe that people receive what they deserve.