Integrating Perspectives: Belief in a Just World Exploration

1. Belief in a Just World:an exploration of cognitiveand behavioral perspectivesLic. Gerardo Primerohttps://ibyme.academia.edu/GerardoPrimero

2. Integration of research fields • My goal is to offer some initial proposals for the integration of 3 research fields: Belief in a Just World (BJW), Behavior Analysis, and Grounded Cognition. • A research field is a community that shares a conceptual background, a set of problems within a domain, a set of cognitive aims, and a set of methods (Bunge, 1985). • A pluralistic approach seeks ways of integrating multiple perspectives and fields (Dale, 2008; Kellert et al, 2006).

3. The research field of BJW • Problems: Behavioral responses to injustice (e.g., compensating a victim, punishing a victimizer, victim blaming, victim derogation, disassociation from the victim). • Aims: How can we explain behavioral responses to injustice? How can we measure BJW and other constructs? • Methods: Experimental procedures (e.g., Lerner, 1980; Hafer, 2002). Instruments for measuring BJW and other constructs. • Methodological argument (Lerner, 2003): Some methods are adequate to explore more conscious responses (e.g., norms, self-interest), but fail to capture more implicit reactions (e.g., justice motive).

4. The research field of behavior analysis • Problems: Environmental contingencies and learning principles. A contingency is a probabilistic regularity between events. • Aims: How can we predict and influence behavior, through the exploration of current and historical contexts of behavior? • Methods: single subject and group experimental designs, instruments for measuring implicit responses (e.g., IRAP). • Methodological argument: inferences of cognitive dispositions lead to circular explanations. It’s better to study the environmental contingencies and physiological mechanisms.

5. How can these fields converge? • BJW, and other beliefs about justice, can be conceived as sets of relational responses (Hayes et al, 2001). • A relational response consists in responding to one event in terms of another event. • Humans learn many kinds of relational responses since childhood (e.g., relation between names and referents, between causes and effects). • “Rules” are sets of relational responses that transform the functions of other events. • In the rule "if you behave well, then you’ll receive a reward", if an individual has learned to relate the terms (“behave well”, “reward”, “if-then”) with the appropriate events and objects, the rule will change some behaviors related to those events and objects.

6. How do we learn rules? • Rules might be learned from (1) direct experience with contingencies, (2) rules verbalized by others, (3) derivation from previously learned rules. • Rules might be explicit or implicit, accurate or inaccurate, simple or complex, self-provided or provided by others. • Rule-following might be maintained by social contingencies (“pliance”: “clean your room, or you won’t see TV”), or by non-social contingencies (“tracking”: “the bathroom is upstairs”). • Some rules include abstract terms ("good", "bad", "right", "fair", "honest") whose relational networks alter the consequential effects of other events (“augmenting”: “bullying is bad”).

7. How do we learn BJW? • BJW is a set of rules: “if X behaves well, then X will get a reward”, “if X gets a reward, then X has behaved well”, and the equivalent rules with bad behavior and punishment. • These four rules might be self-provided or provided by others. • Children learn to regulate their short-term motivations, in order to obtain delayed rewards or prevent delayed aversives (Gross, 2001). • This emotional regulation is learned through verbal instruction, imitation, social contingencies of reinforcement/punishment, and generalization. • This emotional regulation requires a set of rules of the kind “if I do X, then I will get Y” (self-provided, or provided by others). • The other rules of BJW might be self-provided through generalization.

8. Why do we blame the victim? • Events that disconfirm BJW might acquire aversive functions, and motivate operant behaviors to preserve the rule (either restoring justice, or reinterpreting the events). • "Blaming the victim" might be an operant behavior motivated by the aversive evidence, or controlled by the rule "If X gets a punishment, then X has behaved badly". • Each of the previous hypotheses can be challenged by alternative hypotheses. For example, “blaming the victim” might also be learned through imitation and reinforcement. Different people might be influenced by different contingencies and might learn different rules. • The possibilities should be explored with empirical research.

9. How can we explore implicit BJW? • Explicit tests of BJW measure conscious verbal responses (which are easily verbalized and acknowledged). But other responses are less easily verbalized or acknowledged, and require other methods. • IRAP (Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure) is a method for studying implicit responses. The individual must select pairs of stimuli and relational terms according to rules (e.g.: “pleasant-love-similar” in the consistent trial, and “pleasant-accident-similar” in the inconsistent trial). Individuals are faster on consistent trials (because people usually associate “pleasant” with “love”, and not with “accident”). • The same happens with attitudes that the individual doesn’t consciously acknowledge (e.g., an individual with a prejudice towards group X will associate faster the members of X with other disvalued stimuli). • This method might be adapted to study implicit responses related to injustice events.

10. The hypothesis of grounded cognition-1 • Lakoff & Johnson (1999) propose that more abstract concepts are grounded on more concrete concepts. • This might be other explanation of how we learn rules about justice. • "Well-being is (like) Wealth": we can gain it or lose it, we can profit from experience, have a rich life, invest in happiness, waste our lives. • "Justice is (like) Balance": unrighted wrongs are experienced as "imbalance", the righting of wrongs as "recovery of balance". • "Moral Accounting is (like) Financial Transaction": moral actions should be balanced.

11. The hypothesis of grounded cognition-2 • “Moral Accounting” is guided by a set of basic rules: • Reciprocation: “Doing good is moral”, “paying a debt is moral” • Retribution/Revenge: “paying a debt is moral”, “doing harm is immoral” (conflict between goodness and retribution) • Turning the other cheek: “If I don’t retaliate, I’m a better person” • Restitution: “If I do harm, I must cancel the debt” • Altruism: “If I do something good, I cancel my debt” • Karma/BJW: “If I do bad things, I’ll be punished” • Fairness: “people should get what they deserve” (according to different models: equality, needs, work, contract, merits, power, rights, etc.)

12. Are there conflicts between these fields? • Yes, because they have different backgrounds, problems, aims and methods. • For example, behavior analysis avoids dispositional explanations, because they tend to be circular. • But BJW is a dispositional explanation. Desires and beliefs are dispositions inferred from behavior (Schroeder, 2004; Schwitzgebel, 2002). • Circular explanations: “Why do they behave in this way? Because they have these beliefs and desires. And how do we know they have these beliefs and desires? Because they behave in this way.” • The dispositional explanation might have an heuristic value, but according to behavior analysis, it’s better a direct study of environmental contingencies, behavioral regularities, and internal mechanisms.

13. Are there conflicts between these fields? • Another source of conflict is the exclusive reliance on group data. • “The authors (of Social Psychology) typically do not say exactly how many of the participants might have been affected by the variable”, “Once the results are expressed in terms of people, rather than mean group differences, they look considerably less dramatic.” (Billig, 2013) • Lerner (1980) has proposed that “virtually none of us give up the BJW”. But it seems plausible that different rules are involved in different subjects, even when the average data supports Lerner’s hypothesis. • Group data might be complemented with single subject experimental designs. These designs don’t imply that there’s just one individual, but that dependent variables are assessed many times in the experiment and are not combined as average data (Barlow & Hersen, 1988). The goal is to explore the effects of an intervention in the responses of each subject.

14. Is this convergence desirable? • Yes: different research fields can answer different questions. • Tinbergen (1963) proposed 4 questions about behavior: • How does it work? (mechanism & causes) • What's the function? (adaptations & aptations) • How has it developed? (development & learning) • How has it evolved? (evolution of species & culture) • Justice-relatedmotivations and beliefsmighthavedifferentfunctions and learning histories in differentindividuals. • Behavior analysis can explore the role of learning principles and environmental contingencies (in questions 1, 2 & 3).

15. Thanks for your attention!Lic. Gerardo Primerohttps://ibyme.academia.edu/GerardoPrimero