More likely to engage in prosocial behavior when they want to improve success in unrelated future situations (“karmic bargaining”), & more frequently when in a situation they wanted to turn out well

Belief in karma: How cultural evolution, cognition, and motivations shape belief in supernatural justice. Cindel J.M.White, Ara Norenzayan. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, April 17 2019. https://doi.org/10.1016/bs.aesp.2019.03.001

Abstract: Karma is believed to be a source of supernatural justice through which actions lead to morally congruent outcomes, within and across lifetimes. It is a central tenet of many world religions and appears in the social evaluations expressed by religious and non-religious individuals across diverse cultural contexts. Despite its prevalence, research directly investigating belief in karma is currently underrepresented in psychological studies of religion, morality, and justice. In this chapter, we situate karma within existing theories of religious cognition and justice beliefs, while highlighting how it is related to, but distinct from, belief in moralizing gods, beliefs about justice that lack religious or supernatural connotations, and magical thinking. We first describe two prominent explanations for the cross-cultural prevalence of supernatural justice beliefs: These beliefs arise as the by-products of other, more general cognitive mechanisms, and these beliefs are supported by core motivations for sense-making, meaning maintenance, and psychological control. We then consider how questions left unresolved by these cognitive and motivational perspectives, regarding the cross-cultural variability in explicit supernatural justice beliefs, can be explained through a cultural evolutionary perspective on religious cognition. Finally, we describe how these supernatural justice beliefs affect causal judgments and elicit norm-adherence and prosociality among believers.

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2.2 Karma, justice, and fairness
[...] Additionally, North American participants are often willing to make immanent justice attributions, such as admitting that an uncontrollable misfortune is caused by a salient past moral transgressions, while strongly rejecting that misfortune is caused by morallyirrelevant past actions (Callan, Ellard, & Nicol, 2006; Callan, Sutton, & Dovale, 2010; Young et al., 2011). Even people who explicitly deny immanent justice attributions show evidence of intuitive reactions consistent with fairness principles. Reaction time studies indicate that French participants, who explicitly rejected causal attributions for misfortune, still showed evidence of immanent justice intuitions that required effortful suppressions: Participants were slower to reject causal attributions when misfortune followed proportionate bad deeds, and quicker to reject causal attributions when misfortune followed good actions and when misfortune was disproportionate to misdeeds [...].

Similar expectations appear among North Americans when making predictions about the future: People who engage in immoral behavior are expected to have a greater likelihood of bad experiences in the future, at the hands of other people (e.g., being betrayed by a friend, being treated rudely by other people) and forces of nature (e.g., getting a serious illness, having their home damaged by a natural disaster, White, Schaller, & Norenzayan, 2019). Even when not explicitly endorsed, this expectation has been found in North American children and adults who are more likely to engage in prosocial behavior when they want to improve success in unrelated future situations, a strategy known as “karmic bargaining” (Banerjee & Bloom, 2017; Converse, Risen, & Carter, 2012).




In Western samples, karmic bargaining is especially prevalent when belief in a just world is combined with uncertainty about the future. Converse et al. (2012) found greater prosocial behavior among American students and adult online samples after they wrote about a personally relevant ongoing situation that they wanted to turn out well (e.g., important test, job interview, or medical procedure), compared to participants who wrote about their daily routine. This effect was replicated in the context of a job fair, where job-seekers donated more money to charity when they were reminded about the uncertainty of their employment opportunities, compared to when they felt secure in their prospects. Subsequently, those who donated money felt more optimistic about their future.

8. Conclusion
In this chapter, we have described how belief in karmic causality can be studied as a psychological construct that is rooted in core cognitive, motivational, and cultural processes that are central to social psychology. We discussed karma alongside beliefs about morally-concerned gods and expectations about non-supernatural justice, to highlight how common cognitive tendencies and motivations can give rise to a variety of different beliefs. Individual differences (e.g., reliance on intuitive thinking, being “spiritual but not religious”) and situational factors (e.g., uncertainty, a need for structure, and salient past misdeeds followed by misfortune) could similarly encourage belief in karmic causality, morally-concerned gods, and secular justice. Similarly, different concepts can have comparable effects on behavior, such as when Christians reminded of God, or Hindus, Buddhists, and non-religious Americans reminded of karma, become more likely to engage in normative behavior. Karmic beliefs in non-Western, non-Christian cultural contexts provide an important testing ground of theories of religion, morality, and justice across different cultural contexts, extending prevailing research largely tested in Western samples.

Furthermore, many people believe only in a subset of all possible supernatural justice concepts. Cognitive biases and motivational factors are insufficient to explain this variability. The cultural transmission of commitment to particular beliefs is necessary to explain the intertwining of supernatural causality and morality, the presence of agentic vs. nonagentic supernatural entities, and whether causation is believed to happen within interpersonal relationships, within one lifetime, or across lifetimes. In this chapter, we have provided preliminary evidence that belief in karma reflects a unique constellation of these elements and that variability in supernatural justice beliefs can shape causal attributions and behavior in particular belief-consistent ways. Many open questions remain about how cognitive, motivational, and cultural factors interact to shape supernatural justice beliefs, and how the particular beliefs that people hold exert unique effects on cognition and behavior. Throughout this chapter, we have raised several novel hypotheses worthy of future research and described how existing theories of religion and justice can fruitfully be extended to explain a variety of worldviews that are prevalent in diverse cultures around the world.