HRPYC81 Project 4 Assignment 4 (RESEARCH REPORT) 2026 - DISTINCTION GUARANTEED - Personal and General Belief in a Just World

HRPYC81 Project 4 Assignment 4 (RESEARCH REPORT) 2026 - DISTINCTION GUARANTEED - Personal and General Belief in a Just World - DISTINCTION GUARANTEED - DISTINCTION GUARANTEED Answers, guidelines, workings and references . Research Project Personal and General Belief in a Just World Research Area Personality and Social Psychology Number of Students Limited to 400 students Project Description Thabo has always been active in his local ward in KwaZulu-Natal. He believes that by voting, attending community meetings, and speaking up about local issues, he can help improve his neighborhood. “If I do my part, I know things will work out fairly for me,” he says, feeling empowered to take action. At the same time, when he sees other residents struggling with unemployment or crime, he thinks, “Maybe they just aren’t trying hard enough. The world is basically fair - people get what they deserve.” Thabo shares a Belief in a Just World on both a personal and a general level. The former (personal BJW) motivates him to take actions against inequality, while the latter (general BJW) might let him justify inequality. Belief in a Just World, also known as Just-World Hypothesis or Just-World Fallacy, refers to the fundamental tendency to perceive the world as a fair place, where people generally assume that people get what they deserve and deserve what they get (Stroebe et al., 2015, p. 1). This belief enables people to pursue long-term goals and to have trust in future outcomes. Real-world injustices can threaten our Belief in a Just World. To restore justice beliefs, people employ various strategies, ranging from helping the victim to victim-blaming. In essence, the Belief in a Just World is based on a deep-seated motive for justice that prioritises perceiving deservingness to maintain psychological stability, even if it distorts reality. Thus, this belief explains both prosocial tendencies and biases in perceptions of justice. Theoretically grounded in justice motive theory and related to system justification theory, the Belief in a Just World is often described as comprising different dimensions (e.g., personal, others, or chance, God, etc.). Research has shown that it is related to various factors, including personality factors, positive justice experiences, optimism, locus of control, relationship satisfaction, purpose in life, life satisfaction, mental health, resilience, trust, support for justice movements, attributions, and prosocial orientation, among others. In addition, sociodemographic variables such as age, gender, relationship status, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status will be included as potential control variables. These listed factors define the scope of the individual research projects that students will conduct within this research project, culminating in their research report. Specifically, each student is required to select at least two of the listed factors to formulate their individual research 2 problem and research hypotheses for their research project on the psychological experience of mattering. Belief in a just world will be measured with the Global Belief in a Just World scale (Reich & Wang, 2015). Personality will be assessed with the 10-item Big Five Inventory Scale (Rammstedt & John, 2007). Positive justice experiences will be assessed as procedural and distributive justice experience (Blade & Tyler, 2003). Optimism will be assessed using the Life Orientation Test-Revised (LOT-R) as proposed by Scheier et al. (1994). Locus of control will be operationalised as Self-Efficacy and measured by using the General Self-Efficacy Scale (Schwarzer & Jerusalem, 1995). Relationship satisfaction will be measured by adopting the items from the commitment and satisfaction subscales of Rusbult et al. (1998). Purpose in life will be assessed with the Life Engagement Test (Scheier et al., 2006). Life Satisfaction will be assessed as subjective well-being using the Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS; Diener et al., 1985). Mental health will be assessed using the non-clinical Mental Health Continuum-Short Form (MHC-SF), introduced by Keyes (2009) and validated by Lamers et al. (2011). Additionally, we will also assess depression and anxiety using the non-clinical Depression Anxiety Stress Scales (Lovibond & Lovibond, 1995). Prosocial orientation will be assessed as social value orientation (Murphy et al., 2011; Van Lange et al., 2013) and as pro-socialness (Caparara et al., 2005). Resilience will be measured using the Brief Resilience Scale (Smith et al., 2008). Trust will be measured using the General Trust Scale proposed by Yamagishi and Yamagishi (1994). Support for justice movements will be assessed by asking participants to indicate their level of support (e.g., ideological support, donation, participation) for a range of social justice movements relevant to South Africa (e.g., gender justice movements, trade union movements, environmental justice movements, service delivery movements). Sociodemographic variables, including age, gender, relationship status, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status, will also be assessed. Read less