For thousands of years, people have waited on karma to catch up with their good behavior—or promised it would roll around for anyone who crossed them. The lure of karmic thinking is that if you do good things, positive outcomes will rain down on you, while the opposite is true for those who don’t uphold the same standard of morals. In other words: You reap what you sow.
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“It’s a fairly common belief—at least the general idea that there’s a bigger force outside of human beings, like a cosmic force that ensures that in the long run, good things happen to good people, and bad things happen to bad people,” says Cindel White, an assistant professor of social and personality psychology 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 don’t know a lot about it, including “how that belief looks in their daily life, how they feel about it, and how they think about it,” she says.
That’s why, in a study published May 1 in the journal Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, White and her colleagues investigated how people’s psychological motivations drive their beliefs about karma. They found a rather self-serving distinction in exactly how those views play out: Across populations, when people think about their own karma, it tends to be quite positive. But when they consider how karma affects others? Well, let’s just say there are a lot of people who had it coming.
The enduring draw of karma
The concept of karma is rooted in the worldview of many Asian religious traditions, like Hinduism and Buddhism, but it’s also become prevalent in other places, including nonreligious communities. In the last couple years, it’s saturated pop-culture: Taylor Swift, Chappell Roan, and JoJo Siwa, among other artists, all released karma-themed songs. In Swift’s tune, she compares good karma to everything from her boyfriend to a cat purring in her lap because it loves her. “Karma’s a relaxing thought,” she croons. “Aren’t you envious that for you it’s not?”
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The cultural pull toward divine justice has to do with our desire to believe that acting ethically and with compassion will be rewarded—meaning we all have some influence over our destiny. “People want to feel that their lives are fair,” White says. “They like it when people treat each other fairly, and when they think they’re going to go through the world in ways that are predictable and people get what they deserve.” Believing in karma can make setbacks and other challenges easier to endure, she adds, since at some point down the road, good behavior will surely be rewarded.
“Karma and other supernatural beliefs make you think there are higher powers making sure that in the long run, you’re going to get what you deserve,” White says. “It can make you feel optimistic and reassured that, eventually, things will turn out for the best.”
A self-serving perspective
In their new research, White’s team conducted several experiments with more than 2,000 people, who they asked to write about karmic events in their own life or the lives of others. Most people (86%) chose to write about something that had happened to themselves, and of those people, nearly 59% described a positive experience—the result, they believed, of karma. A smaller selection of White’s study participants (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 experiment, people were told to write about something that happened to either themselves or to someone else, and overall, 69% of those writing about themselves focused on a positive karmic experience, while 18% of those assigned to write about someone else centered on a positive experience. The takeaway was clear: Karma is good when we’re thinking about how it affects our own lives, and bad when we consider how it affects others.
The results reinforce the idea that we’re all psychologically motivated to perceive ourselves as “virtuous and deserving of good fortune,” as the study authors put it, “and to perceive other people as recipients of just punishments for their misdeeds.”
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“People are generally pretty motivated to view themselves positively and think about all sorts of things in their life in ways that put themselves in a positive light,” White says. “You can feel good about yourself by thinking you’re in control of the good things that are happening 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 self.”
There are likely a few explanations for why we focus on karmic punishment when considering how karma affects other people. In part, we don’t feel a strong need to view other people positively. “There are lots of reasons that you want to have more confidence in yourself by seeing yourself in a positive light, but we don’t have the same motivation to focus on positivity in other people’s lives,” White says. Explaining other people’s negative experiences as karmic punishment, she adds, satisfies our justice motive—or natural inclination to believe that people receive what they deserve.
Further research
White is continuing to study karma, including whether karmic thinking makes you act more generously toward other people, and more or less likely to help them or punish them. So far, it appears that keeping karma front of mind has “pretty positive consequences,” she says—though some people do become overly fixated on karmic punishment for others.
“It’s all part of the picture of these bigger supernatural belief systems, where it brings a lot to people’s lives and can make them feel better about certain things,” she says. “But it’s not a universal good in every situation.”