http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis
The just-world hypothesis (or just-world fallacy) is a cognitive bias referring to the common assumption that the outcomes of situations are caused or guided by some universal force of justice, order, stability, or desert. In other words, the just-world hypothesis is people's tendency to attribute consequences to, or expect consequences as the result of, a cosmic power responsible for the righting of past wrongs, injustices, or imbalances. The premise of the fallacy popularly appears in English in the form of various figures of speech, which often imply a negative reprisal of justice, such as: "You got what was coming to you," "What goes around comes around," and "You reap what you sow."
This phenomenon has been widely studied by social psychologists since Melvin J. Lerner conducted seminal work on the belief in a just world in the early 1960s.[1] Since that time, research has continued, examining the predictive capacity of the hypothesis in various situations and across cultures, and clarifying and expanding the theoretical understandings of just world beliefs.[2]
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Melvin Lerner
Melvin Lerner was prompted to study justice beliefs and the just world hypothesis in the context of social psychological inquiry into negative social and societal interactions.[3] Lerner saw his work as extending Stanley Milgram's work on obedience. He sought to answer the questions of how regimes that cause cruelty and suffering maintain popular support, and how people come to accept social norms and laws that produce misery and suffering.[4]
Lerner's inquiry was influenced by repeatedly witnessing the tendency of observers to blame victims for their suffering. During his clinical training as a psychologist, he observed treatment of mentally ill persons by the health care practitioners with whom he worked. Though he knew them to be kindhearted, educated people, they blamed patients for their own suffering.[5] He also describes his surprise at hearing his students derogate the poor, seemingly oblivious to the structural forces that contribute to poverty.[3] In a study he was doing on rewards, he observed that when one of two men was chosen at random to receive a reward for a task, observers' evaluations were more positive for the man who had been randomly rewarded than for the man who did not receive a reward.[6][7] Existing social psychological theories, including cognitive dissonance, could not fully explain these phenomena.[7] The desire to understand the processes that caused these observed phenomena led Lerner to conduct his first experiments on what is now called the just world hypothesis.
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