just-world fallacy

The just-world fallacy is the belief that the universe rewards good behavior and punishes bad behavior. While such a belief can be a source of hope for some that if they are kind, then the universe will be kind to them, the belief has a tragic and harmful contrapositive: that if the world is unkind to someone, then they must have deserved it. Bad things of course happen to good people, and blaming the victim only adds to their suffering.

In social systems, the just-world fallacy acts as a stabilizing feedback loop for injustice: when instances of injustice are pointed out and asked to be remedied, the just-world fallacy denies the existence of injustice, perpetuating it.

Jessie Singer in There are No Accidents on how the fallacy of “human error” or “an Accident“ as a root cause of harm allows us to maintain the just-world fallacy:

One of the reasons that we don’t spend money to protect people from accidents is the same reason that many Americans blame poor people for their poverty: the human error explanation absolves us of the responsibility. But blaming human error is also a well-documented cognitive bias that helps us see an unjust world as just. This bias—known as the ‘just world fallacy’—helps us feel more comfortable in a cruel world by focusing on individual behavior to explain systemic failures and structural inequality. In particular, we zero in on anything that reinforces the belief that good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people. In short, the fallacy is believing that the world is fair.