Judicial Reasoning and the 'Just World Delusion': Using the Psychology of Justice to Evaluate Legal Judgments

24 Pages Posted: 6 Dec 2013

See all articles by Julia Davis

Julia Davis

University of South Australia - School of Law

Date Written: July 2, 2009

Abstract

Melvin Lerner is a pioneering social psychologist who has devoted his academic life to studying the origins and nature of our passionate attachment to the idea of justice. He coined the phrase ‘Just World Delusion’ to refer to our need to believe that the world is a just place where people not only ‘get what they deserve’ but where, depending on their behaviour and their attributes, they also appear to deserve the actual fate that life has given them. Our intuitive and deeply embedded human desire to see the world as just (and therefore as secure, controllable and morally balanced) is so strong that if we observe an injustice that we are unable easily to remedy, we can be led to eliminate the threat to our ‘deluded belief’ by reconstruing apparently unjust events so that they appear to be ‘just’. Lerner explains that when people are unable to cope with these events by employing rational tactics, they often resort unconsciously to three ‘non-rational’ strategies that allow them to reinterpret the ‘injustice’ so that it seems to disappear. These commonly observed tactics, which allow people to believe that the person concerned has in some way deserved their fate, include reinterpreting either theoutcome or cause of an event – or even reconstructing the character of the victim. This paper argues that Lerner’s research can provide us with a powerful three-part analytical tool that can assist us not only to construct more convincing arguments in legal cases, but canalso help us to evaluate legal judgments and identify the occasions where the strategies born of the Just World Delusion may have unconsciously been used by advocates or judges. It uses three case studies to illustrate the operation of the Just World Delusion and contains an Appendix that can be used by judges and commentators to evaluate and de-construct the legal reasoning that has been used to justify a decision.

Keywords: Judicial Reasoning, psychology, justice

Suggested Citation

Davis, Julia, Judicial Reasoning and the 'Just World Delusion': Using the Psychology of Justice to Evaluate Legal Judgments (July 2, 2009). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2363731 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2363731

Julia Davis (Contact Author)

University of South Australia - School of Law ( email )

GPO Box 2471
Adelaide SA 5001
Australia
83027209 (Phone)
83027128 (Fax)

HOME PAGE: http://people.unisa.edu.au/Julia.Davis

Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?

Paper statistics

Downloads
137
Abstract Views
602
Rank
379,079
PlumX Metrics