Karma Rewards Me and Punishes You: Self–Other Divergences in Karma Beliefs

Abstract

Many people apply supernatural explanations to understand the cause of important positive and negative life events, but specific types of events are more likely to evoke specific supernatural explanations that best satisfy various personal motives. We test the hypothesis that believers will differ in their willingness to apply karmic explanations to their own experiences compared to the experiences of other people, such that they are more willing to explain their own positive experiences as caused by their own karmic merit (to satisfy selfenhancement motives), while being more willing to explain other people’s negative experiences as karmic punishment for others’ misdeeds (to satisfy justice motives). In three studies (total N = 2,041), we ask participants to recall events believed to have been caused by karma in their own life and events believed to have been caused by karma in the lives of other people, and we code whether these descriptions of karmacaused events are primarily positive or negative, using a combination of human coders, sentiment analysis, and participants’ self-reported evaluations of the events. Results consistently show that positive experiences are more likely to come to mind when they think about how karma influences their own life, but negative experiences are more likely when thinking about other’s karma, although this difference was weaker in Singapore and India than in the United States. Results are consistent with predicted self-enhancement biases in karmic attributions and show how personal motivations predict willingness to adopt supernatural explanations for specific life events.