There is a large body of evidence that the belief in a just world (BJW) affects people's behaviors and attitudes, either through secondary victimization of innocent victims or the promotion of helping behavior. In this article, we aim to address the normativity of the very expression of BJW. Results of two experimental studies show that the expression of a higher degree of BJW is more socially valued than that of a lower one. We argue that this pattern should not only be seen as deriving from intrapersonal motivation to see the world as a predictable place, but also as a norm which seems to be perceived as having both social utility and desirability.

Research on the belief in a just world (BJW) has focused on its intra-individual functions (e.g., psychological well-being) and its inter-individual consequences (e.g., derogation of victims). Recent theorizing, however, has indicated that the BJW may also have more societal functions and consequences, serving as a legitimizing device of the status quo. The studies in the current paper focus on this latter view and are based on Alves and Correia's ( 2008 ) research which found that the expression of high personal and general belief in a just world is injunctively normative. Two experimental studies aimed at ascertaining three issues: (1) the dimension(s) of social value (social utility and/or social desirability) on which the BJW normativity anchors; (2) whether the expression of moderate BJW is also injunctively normative; and (3) whether the injunctive normativity of the BJW is related to perceptions of truth. Results indicate that moderate and high personal and general BJW are normative. Yet, whereas the normativity of personal BJW anchors both on social utility and social desirability, that of general BJW anchors only on social utility. We discuss personal and general BJW as judgement norms, whose normativity may not be personally acknowledged (in the case of general BJW) and does not necessarily derive from being perceived as true, but from the fact that such norms carry social value at least in individualistic societies.

a b s t r a c tTwo factors increase the threat for individuals' belief in a just world (BJW) posed by an innocent victim: the degree of the observer's explicit endorsement of BJW and the fact that the victim shares a common identity with the observer. In this paper, we aim to investigate whether or not these two factors (BJW and ingroup identification) have an interaction effect on each of two mechanisms that reduce the threat to BJW: victim derogation and psychological distancing from the victims. In two studies with university students we predicted and found that BJW interacted with identification with an ingroup victim to predict victim derogation (Study 1) and disidentification from the group shared with the victim (Study 2). In Study 1, the positive relationship between BJW and derogation was significant for strongly identified participants but not for weakly identified participants. In Study 2, high BJW was associated with low ingroup identification only when group salience was activated.

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This article aims to study whether individuals perceive secondary victimisation reactions as counter-normative or normative (at both a prescriptive and descriptive level) and whether these judgments depend on the victim's innocence (responsibility), the participants' belief in a just world and the sex of the victim. An experimental study was conducted and, overall, most ratings were in the direction of non-secondary victimisation reactions, independently of the innocence of the victim and of the norm considered. The sole exception involved the perception that most people approve of and do hold a non-innocent victim responsible for what happened to them. Nevertheless, even in the case of non-secondary victimisation reactions, participants stated that social norms regarding the victim's valuation and the recognition of their suffering would be more likely to be directed towards an innocent than a non-innocent victim. Furthermore, results suggest a discrepancy between injunctive and descriptive social norms regarding valuation and contacting victims. The latter result is discussed in light of the perverse norm concept.