Believe in karma. Even though it’s not real

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jan/09/karma-schoolboy-ben-azarya-banksy-good-deed

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It may be some time before experts can authenticate the print now owned by Cumbrian schoolboy Ben Azarya. The 15-year-old was on a train near Oxenholme when a fellow passenger spilled a rucksack containing spray paints and a gas mask. After Azarya helped him to gather up the contents, the stranger scrawled something on an art print and handed it across, saying “This will be worth about £20,000 – have a good life.” The scrawl on the print was a signature: Banksy.

If the signature does prove to be genuine, I suspect Ben will not be the only one smiling. There are few narratives more enjoyable than the tale of a good deed that reaps instant and unexpected rewards. Take the story of a homeless man from Preston, known only as Robbie. Late one evening, shortly before Christmas, he met a distressed young student who had lost her bank card and faced a long walk home. Robbie emptied his pockets of about £3 in change and offered it to her to help pay for a taxi to get her back safely. The student declined the donation but was so moved by the gesture that she began raising money to get Robbie into a flat of his own. At the beginning of his week, donations topped 30,000.

There was a time when such stories would have been shared as religious parables or fairy story morality tales. Nowadays we tend to enjoy them through a lens of pop mysticism, as instant karma. Indeed, if there is one thing more enjoyable than a case of good things happening to good people, it is surely bad things happening to bad people. However many cute kittens and koalas in mittens might clutter up the web, I would challenge you to find a video clip more heartwarming than this internet classic, the scarpering bag snatcher who knocks himself out on a plate glass door.

The theory that people get what is coming to them, for good or ill, is a compelling notion. It is also, sad to say, usually absolute bunkum. Of all the cognitive biases that plague humanity, one of the strongest (and most extensively studied by psychologists) is the just-world fallacy. Since being identified by Melvin Lerner in the mid-1960s, just-world thinking has had a pretty bad press in the research literature. It appears to cause us to overestimate the extent to which people who live in poverty, with disabilities, or as the victims of crime, are the architects of their own misfortune. The just-world fallacy explains why people feel motivated to donate to help a homeless man who has proved himself good – the knowledge that a kind, generous man is sleeping on the streets causes us stressful cognitive dissonance. At the same time, it may also help to explain our capacity to step over a beggar on the way into a shop without so much as a twinge – deep down, a bit of us thinks he must deserve it.

So powerful is our tendency towards the just-world fallacy that there are some clinicians who argue it is essential to maintaining our psychological wellbeing. A stronger tendency towards the belief is said to correlate with lower rates of depression, anxiety and other mental illnesses. So it may be that our eagerness to read and share stories of good things happening to good people and bad to bad is not only uplifting, but actually therapeutic.

It does come as a comfort to know that the small act of kindness performed by young Ben Azarya may ultimately pay his way through university rather than, say, earning him a knock on the door for aiding and abetting a known felon and conspiracy to commit criminal damage. Even if that is not the kind of universe we live in most of the time, sometimes we just need to believe.