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We used the theory of belief in a just world (BJW) to systematically examine how general BJW influences decision making about helping in emergency situations involving different attributions. Participants were 740 college students who completed a survey measuring general BJW, moral disengagement, and propensity to help in emergency scenarios. Results showed that both general BJW and attribution scenario type influenced emergency helping. Furthermore, general BJW moderated the magnitude of the effect of victim attribution on helping, playing a stronger role in negatively predicting helping propensity in an obscure attribution scenario than in drunken (internal attribution) or accident (external attribution) scenarios. Moral disengagement mediated the effect of general BJW on helping only in the obscure attribution scenario. These findings provide further empirical evidence for BJW theory, accounting for some situations involving immoral decision making, as well as clarifying where and how general BJW influences the propensity to help.
Keywords: attribution, helping propensity, emergency situation, general belief in a just world, moral disengagement, decision making.
Imagine a person loses consciousness on a roadside-what might determine a stranger's decision to help the person experiencing this emergency? Prosocial behavior, which refers to a broad category of acts that benefit others, including helping, sharing, cooperating, donating, and self-sacrificing (Eisenberg, Losoya, & Guthrie, 1997), plays a significant role in human survival and development. Social psychological research on prosocial behavior has been partially focused on bystander intervention in emergency situations since Kitty Genovese's murder in New York in 1964 (Clark & Word, 1972; Darley & Latane, 1968). That is, victims do not always elicit sympathy or helping behavior from observers.
Per belief in a just world (BJW) theory, people have a fundamental need to believe that the world is a place in which people usually get what they deserve (Lerner & Miller, 1978). People with high BJW do not perceive the world as chaotic and unpredictable, but as a place where performance and results are systematically related (Lerner, 1980); thus, they believe there is no undeserved suffering (Lerner & Simmons, 1966). Accordingly, BJW often leads to victim blaming and derogation (Furnham, 2003; Hafer & Begue, 2005). Even when victims are seen as undeserving of their fate, observers perceive that there is a greater risk that the event would happen to themselves,...