A school rampage threatens beliefs in justice: A longitudinal study of the belief in a just world among Chinese adolescents

Abstract

old man, stabbed 13 children at the gate of a primary school in Nanping, Fujian Province. Eight of them died. In the 5 weeks that followed, more copycat killings happened in four other cities, and numerous children were killed or injured. These school attacks shocked the whole country. Officials ordered an increase in security at schools and nurseries, and the public security bureaus and judicial authorities called for severe punishment for such crimes. The attacks were widely publicized after the first set of killings; however, the news coverage was soon extinguished given the fears of further copycat killings (Steinmueller & Wu, 2011). Severe cases of unfairness such as these are rare, but in daily life, people are often confronted with some sort of injustice. Despite the unsettling nature of such events, most people manage to deal with them and maintain good mental health.According to Lerner (1980), resources for coping with such events are grounded in the fundamental illusion that the world is a fair place. He suggested that people need to believe that the world is a place where everyone gets what they deserve. In the face of injustice, people are motivated to sustain this belief (Lerner, 1980). But are people able to maintain their belief in justice even when they are exposed

A Fair Go? How Belief in a Just World Shaped Attitudes, Intentions, and Behaviours Before and After the Australian Referendum on a First Nations Voice to Parliament

“…However, our approach is notable because we were able to measure BJW prior to an intervening momentous event and test its effects on pre-event intentions and post-event actual behaviour. We can find no other instances of such a pre-meditated design in the BJW literature, other than when researchers have serendipitously measured BJW prior to a salient event and subsequently measured postevent attitudes (e.g., Kaiser et al, 2004, who measured a sample of Americans' BJW prior to 9/11; and Stupnianek et al, 2022, who measured a Chinese sample's BJW prior to a series of school attacks).…”

Gender and Age Invariance of the Global Belief in a Just World Scale

“…The second notable scale is the Global Belief in a Just World Scale (GBJWS; Lipkus, 1991). Both have garnered validation and have been utilized in Chinese research contexts (Jiang et al, 2016; Stupnianek et al, 2022; Wu et al, 2011). While both scales address BJW, they focus on distinct belief subjects.…”