The Just World and Winston Churchill: An Approach/Avoidance Conflict about Psychological Distance When Harming Victims
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
How do people respond when they observe a victim's undeserved suffering, such as when competent, hardworking employees are laid off for reasons that have nothing to do with their performance? Lerner's famous just world hypothesis (e.g., Lerner, 1980; Lerner & Simmons, 1966) addressed reactions by non-harmdoing observers, such as outsiders who learn about the suffering of laid-off employees. We instead address the case of harmdoing observers, such as the managers who lay off the employees. In the Lerner analysis, witnesses to a victim's undeserved suffering “will be increasingly likely to reject that victim as a function of the degree of injustice associated with the victim's fate” (Lerner, 1980, p. 56). Because victims received derogatory ratings under the predicted conditions, this form of rejection is known as victim derogation. Other possible responses – such as prevention, restitution, and acceptance of one's limitations – Lerner called rational tactics. Nonrational tactics that involve variations on the theme of ego defense, of course, constitute the more interesting category from a psychological perspective. These include denial/withdrawal and reinterpretation. Derogating a victim is a special case of the latter – namely, a reinterpretation of the victim's character. Other psychological defenses in the same category (nonrational tactics) include reinterpreting the outcome and reinterpreting the cause. In the original Lerner and Simmons (1966) paradigm, the observer was innocent and powerless.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it