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When it comes to karma, most people believe the universe is their own personal cheerleader — but an exacting judge for everyone else, according to a new study published May 1 by the American Psychological Association in the journal Psychology of Religion and Spirituality.
Researchers asked more than 2,000 people from various religious and nonreligious backgrounds to write about their experiences with karma — the belief that good deeds are rewarded, and bad actions are punished — and a common through-line of their responses emerged.
When the participants wrote about themselves, 59% told tales of being rewarded for their good deeds. In their stories about others, 92% chronicled how misfortune befell cheating partners, indebted friends, bullies and lousy coworkers.
“Thinking about karma allows people to take personal credit and feel pride in good things that happen to them even when it isn’t clear exactly what they did to create the good outcome,” the study’s senior author, Cindel White, said in a statement. “But it also allows people to see other people’s suffering as justified retribution.”
The findings offer a window into the way our minds form judgments about ourselves and those around us, said White, an assistant professor at York University in Toronto who studies how psychological motives interact with spirituality.
“I firmly believe in providing charitable donations to those in need, no matter how small,” one anonymous response from the study reads. “Doing so has benefited me greatly and occasionally has led to individuals doing me favors without asking.”
Another reads, “I knew a guy who was always rude and cruel to everyone; he never did anything nice his entire life. He was diagnosed with cancer, and I just couldn’t help but think that was karma.”
The study identifies the tendency to see yourself as deserving of good fortune, even in the absence of direct causes, as a form of “attribution bias,” — a concept which has been studied by psychologists for decades, said Patrick Heck, a research psychologist at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, commenting in his personal capacity.
“Attribution theory and attribution biases are the general idea that people attribute certain things that happen to them or other people in line with ways that make them feel good about themselves,” said Heck, who was not involved in the study.
In some ways, attribution bias serves the purpose of promoting self-esteem, which helps people overcome challenges in life, White said. But other times, it could lead people astray when they fail to recognize the contributions of others or the external factors of success.
On the other side of the coin, the belief that other people’s suffering is a form of punishment comes from a need to believe that the world is just. This belief can help people make sense of the complexity of life, Heck said.
“(The world) is full of statistical noise. Random things happen to people all the time. And we know from lots of research in psychology that people struggle to reconcile randomness in their lives,” Heck said. “It’s very compelling to want to have a story or an explanation for why good things happen to some people and why bad things happen to other people. … I think karma is a really nicely packaged way that maybe has found its way into religion and other belief systems.”
The concept of karma originates from Asian religious traditions such as Hinduism and Buddhism, and many variations exist in how it’s practiced between different groups, White said. For this reason, the study sampled participants from the United States, Singapore and India to get a broad range of cultural and religious backgrounds.
Notably, results skewed slightly differently between Western and non-Western respondents, with Indian and Singaporean participants showing less self-enhancing bias — a finding that is consistent with previous research.
“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 said. “But across all countries, participants were much more likely to say that other people face karmic punishments while they receive karmic rewards.”
White said her future research will explore how these beliefs around karma affect decision-making.
“There’s sometimes differences between your religious beliefs, what people actually think about in everyday life, and then how they act,” White said. “There could be other situations where they are prompted by the experience itself, and they’re going to think about karma in a very different way.”
Still, belief-driven biases can have broad, real-world implications, especially when it comes to policymaking and our justice system, Heck said.
Often, social prejudices such as racism and classism function on the premise that an “inferior” group earned its status by behaving in a way that is socially unacceptable, said Yudit Jung, an adjunct associate professor of psychology at Emory University in Atlanta who was not involved in the research. Such views can then inform people’s treatment of those groups and their willingness to offer help.
Ultimately, Jung, who is also a practicing psychoanalyst, said she believes the studied biases are common to most people. They can be a form of defense, originating from early childhood experiences and the need to feel secure.
“I work with patients a lot on (developing) compassion and a sense of shared humanity, recognizing that we are all a mixture of good and bad,” Jung said. “It’s not about influencing religion. It’s about a patient’s basic ethics.”
