Karma enhances me while punishing you

When it comes to karma, our thoughts play fascinating skills, as new research shows that we are more likely to see positive karmic experiences in our lives while noting that it is primarily negative in other people’s lives.

The comprehensive study, published on May 1 in the journal Religion and Spiritual Psychology, found that karmic believers in multiple cultures always apply supernatural justice in a self-service manner that meets deeper psychological needs.

“In a variety of cultural environments, including Western samples, we found that people often think about themselves in exaggerated positive ways, as well as samples from Asian countries, where people are more likely to be self-critical,” said Dr. Cindel White of York University, the lead author of the study.

The team conducted three experiments on more than 2,000 participants from different religious backgrounds, including Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, and non-religious people in the United States, Singapore and India. Participants were asked to recall and write information about karmic events in their own lives or in other people’s lives.

In all experiments, the researchers found that when asked about themselves, 69% of participants described positive karma experiences—good things happened due to their good deeds. However, when writing about others, 82% describe experiences of negative karma – bad things happen as punishment for misconduct.

Although this self-service bias appears in all the countries studied, it is the strongest among the American participants in the Singapore and India sample, traditionally emphasizing self-criticism and collectivism rather than individualism.

“The positive bias of karmic self-cognition in the Indian and Singapore samples is somewhat weak compared to the U.S. sample, but in all countries, participants are more likely to say that others face karmic punishment while receiving karmic rewards.”

This pattern reveals basics about how supernatural beliefs meet various psychological needs. Although karma provides a framework that makes action consequential, our thoughts selectively apply this framework in a way that protects and enhances our self-image.

This study, based on previous work, shows that people tend to attribute their success to internal factors such as skills and efforts, while also blaming failures on external circumstances – a well-documented phenomenon known as self-service bias. It is worth noting how to expand into the supernatural realm.

“Thinking about karma, even if they don’t know what they do to create good results, people can be proud of their own good things even if they can’t convince them to do exactly what they do, which also allows people to see other people’s suffering as justified retribution.”

These findings provide a relevance on how ancient religious concepts like karma, common in Hindu and Buddhist traditions but increasingly adopted in Western societies, interact with basic human psychological tendencies. These patterns may influence moral decision-making, emotional responses to life events and how we perceive justice in our daily experiences.

As supernatural beliefs continue to shape how billions of people understand their world, this study shows that we should take care of our tendency to apply these beliefs in asymmetric ways that benefit ourselves while making us distorted our misfortune with others.