FOr thousands of years, people have waited for karma to catch up with their good behavior – or promised that it would take place for anyone crossing them. The attraction of karmic thought is that if you do good things, the positive results will rain on you, while the opposite is true for those who do not respect the same level of morality. In other words: you harvest what you sow.
“It is a fairly common belief – at least the general idea that there is a greater force outside of human beings, like a cosmic force which guarantees that in the long term, good things happen to good people, and bad things happen to bad people,” explains Cindel White, assistant professor of social psychology and personality at York University in Toronto who has long studied Karma. Despite the fact that so many people subscribe to this supernatural belief system, researchers still do not know much, in particular “how this belief looks like their daily life, how they think and how they think about it,” she said.
This is why, in a Study published on May 1 in the newspaper Psychology of religion and spiritualityWhite and his colleagues studied how people's psychological motivations stimulate their beliefs on karma. They found a rather selfish distinction in the way these opinions take place: through populations, when people think of their own karma, it tends to be quite positive. But when they consider how karma affects others? Well, let's just say that there are many people who brought it.
The sustainable karma drawing
The concept of Karma is rooted in the vision of the world of many Asian religious traditions, such as Hinduism and Buddhism, but it has also become widespread in other places, including non -religious communities. Over the past two years, it is a saturated pop culture: Taylor Swift, Chappell Roan and Jojo Siwa, among other artists, have all published songs on the theme of Karma. In the SWIFT melody, she compares the good karma to everything, from her boyfriend to a purring cat on her lap because he loves her. “Karma is a relaxing thought”, ” She crunches. “You are not envious for you is not the case?”
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Cultural attraction towards Divine Justice has to do with our desire to believe that to be ethically and with compassion will be rewarded – which means that we all have a certain influence on our destiny. “People want to feel that their lives are right,” says White. “They love it when people treat themselves equitably, and when they think they will go through the world in a predictable way and people get what they deserve.” Believing in Karma can make the reverse and other challenges easier to bear, she adds, because at some point, good behavior will surely be rewarded.
“Karma and other supernatural beliefs make you think that there are higher powers by assuring yourself in the long term, you will get what you deserve,” says White. “It can make you optimistic and reassured that, in the end, things are revealed for the best.”
A selfish perspective
In their new research, White's team has conducted several experiences with more than 2,000 people, which they asked to write on karmic events in their own lives or on the lives of others. Most people (86%) have chosen to write about something that happened to themselves, and on these people, almost 59% described a positive experience-the result, they thought, from Karma. A smaller selection of participants in White's study (14%) chose to write about something that had happened to other people – and 92% focused on a negative experience caused by bad karma.
In another experience, people were invited to write about something that happened to themselves or to someone else, and overall, 69% of those who wrote on themselves focused on a positive karmic experience, while 18% of people affected to write on someone else focused on a positive experience. The point to remember was clear: the karma is good when we think about how it affects our own life, and bad when we consider how it affects others.
The results reinforce the idea that we are all psychologically motivated to perceive ourselves as “virtuous and deserving of good fortune”, as the authors of the study say, “and to perceive others as recipients of punishments simply for their misdeeds”.
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“People are generally quite motivated to see themselves positively and to think of all kinds of things in their lives in a way that is put in a positive day,” explains White. “You can feel good about yourself by thinking that you control the good things that happen to you, and you can feel confident in your future if you think you can do good things now to create good for your future me.”
There are probably some explanations to explain why we focus on karmic punishment when we consider how karma affects others. Partly, we don't feel a strong need to see others positively. “There are many reasons why you want to have more confidence in you by seeing you in a positive light, but we do not have the same motivation to focus on positivity in the lives of others,” says White. Explaining the negative experiences of others as a karmic punishment, she adds, satisfies our reason for justice-or a natural inclination to believe that people receive what they deserve.
Additional research
White continues to study karma, including if karmic thinking makes you act more generously towards other people, and more or less likely to help or punish them. Until now, it seems that keeping karma in mind has “fairly positive consequences”, she says – although some people become too fixed on karmic punishment for others.
“All this is part of the image of these greatest systems of supernatural beliefs, where it brings a lot to people's lives and can make them feel better in certain things,” she said. “But it is not a universal good in each situation.”
