Belief in a just world or self-serving strategy?

This study was conducted to examine the role of the individual's social power on endorsement of belief in a just world in the social domain. We hypothesized that the greater social power an individual has, the stronger the belief which s/he has in a just world. One hundred subjects of low or high socioeconomic status were randomly given low or high diagnosis of their social power after having completed a test which was presented as an evaluation of their actual and future social power in the socioprofessional domain. Results showed that subjects with low socioeconomic status believed that the world was less just in the low social power diagnosis condition than in the high one, while the belief in a just world of subjects with high socioeconomic status was not significantly affected by the experimental design.