title: Who deserves to be sick? An exploration of the relationships between belief in a just world, illness causal attributions and their fairness judgements.
abstract: This research explored relationships between beliefs about justice, illness causal attributions and fairness judgements of those causes. Participants (n = 200) completed questionnaires assessing their belief in a just world (BJW) and measuring causal attributions and fairness judgements for 42 illness causes classified into behavioural, environmental and hidden (genetic, mystic, psychosocial) categories. As predicted, BJW was correlated positively with all fairness judgements, but with none of the illness causal attributions. Behavioural causes of illness were judged to be fairer than environmental causes, which were judged fairer than hidden causes. Finally, for environmental and hidden causes (uncontrollable illness attributions), positive correlations between causal attributions and their corresponding fairness judgements were found only among participants with high BJW. Implications of these findings for decision makers and health professionals are discussed, with emphasis on the need to consider the combined effect of causal attributions and BJW on illness fairness judgements.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel. gabyn@post.tau.ac.il
authors.forename: Gabriel
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Nudelman
authors.forename: Shoshana
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Shiloh
mesh_terms: D000223:Adaptation, Psychological; D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001294:Attitude to Health; D015984:Causality; D003469:Culture; D004194:Disease / Q000209:etiology / Q000523:psychology*; D005260:Female; D015438:Health Behavior; D006801:Humans; D007389:Internal-External Control; D007600:Judgment; D008297:Male; D011582:Psychological Theory; D012044:Regression Analysis; D060685:Sense of Coherence; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D055815:Young Adult