Melvin Lerner

Who they are

Lerner is an American-Canadian social psychologist and a Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the psychology department at the University of Waterloo, where, according to the vault's own note on him, he founded the division of social psychology. The biographical detail comes from that note and was not re-checked for this page.

What the sources checked for this publication establish is his authorship. He is the first author of the 1966 experiment, he wrote the 1980 book, and the 2005 review by Hafer and Bègue builds on his proposal that people need to believe the world is fair, so that evidence of injustice is threatening and people use strategies to cope with that threat.

The attribution on this page is checked against the primary papers, and a reader looking for the origin of the idea should start from his 1966 experiment with Carolyn Simmons and his 1980 book.

Key papers

Lerner, M. J., & Simmons, C. H. (1966). Observer's reaction to the 'innocent victim': Compassion or rejection? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 4(2), 203-210. In the experiment, seventy-two female undergraduates watched a staged victim who appeared to receive painful shocks. Observers who expected her suffering to continue rated her lower than observers who had voted for her to be rewarded and been told the vote succeeded, and the lowest ratings came when she seemed to suffer for the observers' sake.

Lerner, M. J. (1980). The Belief in a Just World: A Fundamental Delusion. New York: Plenum Press. Cited here by title and year from the vault note; the book itself was not consulted.

Key ideas

The central idea is that people are motivated to see the world as fair. Seeing an innocent person suffer threatens that view, and one way of removing the threat is to devalue the person, which later work calls victim derogation. The 2020 meta-analysis of 55 derogation studies by Dawtry and colleagues found a small average effect that varies widely and depends on how vivid and close the scene is, so the strongest popular form of the idea is stronger than the pooled evidence.

The same belief has a second face. Reviews of the literature describe it as linked to pursuing long-term goals with confidence, and Claudia Dalbert's 1999 work distinguishes a personal belief that the world is just for me from the general belief. See Belief in a Just World, Victim Derogation and Personal Belief in a Just World.

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