Most People Believe They’re Due Good Karma, But Others Deserve Karmic Punishment

People who believe in something like karma are more likely to view good things happening to them as signs of their karmic merit. In contrast, when bad things happen to other people, those with karmic beliefs are more likely to see them as being the results of karmic punishment that the person earned. This research indicates a bias towards viewing the self more favorably while seeing the suffering of others as justified retribution.

Across the world, the concept of karmic causality is important to various worldviews, especially within Asian religious traditions, such as Hinduism and Buddhism, but it is also present in some Christian groups as well as non-religious Western traditions. Although each culture explains the mechanisms differently and weaves them into their wider views in specific ways, they all share the same broad assumption: that the universe contains some impersonal cosmic force that takes account of people’s moral behavior and bestows rewards or punishments accordingly.

Generally speaking, someone can deploy karma as a way to understand any type of experience they have. If something good happens to them – they get a promotion, they find some money on the street, a stranger’s dog comes over to say hi – they can interpret that as a sign of their good karma. Or, if bad things happen to them – their transport to work is cancelled, they spill coffee down their lap, they don’t see a dog on the street but are instead presented by an indifferent cat – they can see that as karmic punishment for something they’ve done.

Obviously, the examples I have used here are small ones and you can insert any degree of good or bad experience as existing within this system of thought. However, given that people are complex creatures with their own psychological motivators, how likely are they to apply the karmic causality logic to events in their lives or those of others?

This is something Cindel White from York University and colleagues wanted to explore. They hypothesized that our desire to believe in a just world – one where bad deeds are punished – forces people to focus on karmic punishment when thinking abut how karma impacts others. In contrast, they hypothesized that a competing psychological motivation – the desire to see ourselves as good people (known as a self-positivity bias) – could result in believers focusing on evidence of good karma in their own lives.

To test this, the team undertook several experiments with over 2,000 participants, where they asked people to recall and write about perceived karmic events in their lives and in those of others.

During the first experiment, the team examined data from 478 US participants, all of whom indicated they believed in karma. These participants all came from different religious backgrounds – 29 percent Christian, 30 percent Buddhist, 22 percent Hindu, 4 percent other religions, and 15 percent non-religious.  

These participants were asked to write about karmic events that had happened to them or to someone else. The responses were then examined by trained coders who assessed whether they were about positive or negative karmic events and whether it was personal or happened to someone else. In this experiment, 86 percent of participants wrote about a personal karmic event and 59 percent of those were positive experiences due to good karma. In contrast, of the 14 percent who wrote about other people’s karmic experiences, 92 percent were negative.

In a second experiment, over 1,200 participants were randomly selected to write about something that either happened to them or to someone else. This experiment included US participants as well, but also had a sample of Buddhists in Singapore and Hindus in India. Overall, 69 (stop it) percent who were assigned to write about themselves focused on positive karmic experiences, while only 18 percent of participants who were meant to write about other people focused on positive events.

A computer analysis of the sentiment of the words used by participants also indicated that stories were more likely to have positive sentiment when people wrote about their own karmic experiences.

It is, however, interesting to note that these differences were more apparent among US participants. This is consistent with evidence from other work that shows how self-positivity bias is less prevalent in Indian or Singaporean cultures, when compared to the US.    

“We found very similar patterns across multiple cultural contexts, including Western samples, where we know people often think about themselves in exaggeratedly positive ways, and samples from Asian countries where people are more likely to be self-critical,” White explained in a statement.

“This satisfies various personal motives – to see oneself as good and deserving of good fortune, and to see justice in other people’s suffering – and supernatural beliefs like karma might be especially good at satisfying these motives when other, more secular explanations fail.”

The paper is published in Psychology of Religion and Spirituality.