Immanent Justice Reasoning by Spatial Proximity

Abstract

Immanent justice reasoning involves causally attributing someone’s bad outcome to their prior immoral actions. Building on the idea that causality is mentally linked with spatial proximity, we investigated whether such reasoning might lead participants to spatially bind together immoral actions and bad outcomes. Across four experiments ( N = 553, Mechanical Turk workers), participants positioned sentences describing other people’s bad (vs. good) outcomes closer in space to previous immoral behaviors. This effect was observed both when the position of the initial action remained in a fixed location and when it “chased” the outcome across the screen. Importantly, we also found that this spatial positioning of immoral actions and bad outcomes is mediated by perceived deservingness of the outcome and is not merely due to perceived similarity of events. These findings suggest that perceived deservingness biases the spatial proximity of representations of others’ random bad outcomes and their prior immoral actions.

The role of karmic beliefs in immanent justice reasoning.

“…Following Callan, Moreton, and Hughes (2020), participants responded to eight scenarios describing someone engaging in an immoral behavior (e.g., “Frank raped a co-worker”) and experiencing either a bad (e.g., “Frank was in a freak car accident”) or good (e.g., “Frank won a luxury cruise trip”) outcome. For each participant, four scenarios involved a morally congruent (bad) outcome for the target and four involved a morally incongruent (good) outcome.…”