The relation between belief in a just world and early processing of deserved and undeserved outcomes: An ERP study

ABSTRACT

We used event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine how quickly people in general, and certain people in particular, process deservingness-relevant information. Female university students completed individual difference measures, including individual differences in the belief in a just world (BJW), a belief that people get what they deserve. They then read stories in which an outcome was deserved, undeserved, or neither deserved nor undeserved (i.e., “neutral”) while their ERPs were recorded with scalp electrodes. We found no overall differentiation between early ERP responses (<300 ms post-stimulus onset) to deserved, undeserved, and neutral outcomes. However, BJW correlated with the difference between early ERP responses to these forms of information (rs from |.44| to |.61|; ps from .018 to < .001). The early nature of our effects (e.g., 96 ms after stimulus onset) suggests individual differences in socially-relevant information processing that begins before conscious evaluation of the stimuli. Potential underlying processes include automatic attention to schema-relevant information and to unexpected (and therefore salient) information and automatic processing of belief-consistent information. Our research underscores the importance of the concept of deservingness in human information processing as well as the utility of ERP technology and robust statistical analyses in investigations of complex social stimuli.

KEYWORDS:

• Deservingness
• belief in a just world
• ERPs
• individual differences
• early visual processing

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada under Grant 435-2014-0551. We thank Emily Davis for her help at early stages of this project and Sara Stephenson for her help with data collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

¹ Our a priori goal was to collect data from between 40 and 50 participants, as has been typical for successful individual difference EEG studies in our lab.

² Participants were women only, as in Hafer et al. (2020), because story pre-testing showed that men and women had differing opinions on the degree to which various outcomes were deserved.

³ Although ERP studies on word reading traditionally present sentences one word at a time, we avoided this practice to facilitate more normal reading habits and integration of more complex story scenarios than traditionally are presented in semantic anomaly studies of the N400 ERP component (Kutas & Hillyard, 1980). We know from the literature on normal reading that people grasp and process multiple-word meaning units in single saccades (Snell et al., 2018). Therefore, we expected ERPs time locked to the onset of such phrases would reflect reaction to the whole phrase.

⁴ In other words, the electrode sites that were used in the present analyses represent an average of five or six single EGI channels that approximate each of the corresponding 10–20 sites analyses (e.g., Oz = average of E75, E71, E74, E76, and E81). See Figure S1 for the specific sites included in the averaged ROIs.

⁵ We include results from Fz, FCz and Cz in part because we were interested in effects matching the timing of the N2 (a marker of conflict detection), which occurs at frontocentral sites. Also, some researchers have reported that the effects occurring at the time of the N170 at these sites, also known as the VPP, reflect additional source contributions from the orbital frontal cortex and not simply the other end of the dipole created by the occipito-parietal source generator (Wong et al., 2009).

⁶ This procedure corrects alpha by considering all time points in the family of tests (Benjamini & Hochberg, 1995; Groppe et al., 2011).

⁷ Significant effects from 401 to 1000 ms post-stimulus are in Tables S1, S2, and S3.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [435-2014-0551].