Question

In Hinduism, "Karma is the moral law of cause and effect, and belief in karma is a belief that every action has an automatic moral consequence. ... “What goes around comes around.” Karma does not work because it is the will of God or Brahman, but simply because karma is an essential part of the nature of things" (eText, pg.84). Do you believe in Karma or anything like it? Why or why not? How might karma be an important belief to have in terms of how we look at our behavior? Karma is a Hindu religious belief, but do you think a completely non-religious person could still believe in karma? Why or why not?

Answer 1

Karma is believed to be a source of supernatural justice through which actions lead to morally-congruent outcomes, within and across lifetimes. It is a central tenet of many world religions and appears in the social evaluations expressed by religious and non-religious individuals across diverse cultural contexts. Despite its prevalence, research directly investigating belief in karma is currently underrepresented in psychological studies of religion, morality, and justice. In this chapter, we situate karma within existing theories of religious cognition and justice beliefs, while highlighting how it is related to, but distinct from, belief in moralizing gods, beliefs about justice that lack religious or supernatural connotations, and magical thinking. We first describe two prominent explanations for the cross-cultural prevalence of supernatural justice beliefs: These beliefs arise as the by-products of other, more general cognitive mechanisms, and these beliefs are supported by core motivations for sense-making, meaning maintenance, and psychological control. We then consider how questions left unresolved by these cognitive and motivational perspectives, regarding the cross-cultural variability in explicit supernatural justice beliefs, can be explained through a cultural evolutionary perspective on religious cognition. Finally, we describe how these supernatural justice beliefs affect causal judgments and elicit norm-adherence and prosociality among believers.

What determines the direction of one's rebirth is karma. The word comes from a root that means "to do" and implies the notion of moral consequences that are carried along with every act. Karma is the moral law of cause and effect, and belief in karma is a belief that every action has an automatic moral consequence. One well-known saying expresses nicely the nature of karma: What goes around comes around. Karma does not work because it is the will of God or Brahman, but simply because karma is an essential part of the nature of things. It is the way things work. Good karma brings "higher" rebirth; bad karma brings rebirth in "lower," more painful forms. In a certain way, this belief allows for upward mobility, since human beings.How do people explain why some individuals experience good fortune—wealth, status, health, and prosocial treatment from others—whereas others experience struggles, failures, and suffering in life? Many people throughout the world believe that the cause of good and bad life experiences can be traced to a person’s past good and bad actions. Good acts cause good things to happen, bad acts cause bad things to happen, and these causal connections are etched into the fabric of the universe over long timescales, even when no physical connection is discernible between actions and experiences. This belief that “what goes around, comes around” is commonly found in many world religions.

Belief in witchcraft and magical causality, like karma, also posits unseen causal connections between actions and conceptually-similar experiences. However, witchcraft often entails a variety of considerations and mediating factors that are absent in karmic causality.Karma is an interesting test case for the generalizability of these hypotheses, as it also includes key elements that can plausibly be traced to broad cognitive tendencies underlying supernatural beliefs. Like engaging in teleological thinking, karma posits an intentional purpose for life events, as caused by past actions; mind-body dualism allows for the expectation that karmic consequences manifest after reincarnation in future lifetimes, when minds are reincarnated in new bodies; karma might be conceived of as an external agent, watching and remembering people’s actions, thereby engaging believers’ mentalizing abilities to think about karma.

Furthermore, many people believe only in a subset of all possible supernatural justice concepts. Cognitive biases and motivational factors are insufficient to explain this variability. The cultural transmission of commitment to particular beliefs is necessary to explain the intertwining of supernatural causality and morality, the presence of agentic vs. non-agentic supernatural entities, and whether causation is believed to happen within interpersonal relationships, within one lifetime, or across lifetimes. In this chapter, we have provided preliminary evidence that belief in karma reflects a unique constellation of these elements and that variability in supernatural justice beliefs can shape causal attributions and behavior in particular belief-consistent ways. Many open questions remain about how cognitive, motivational, and cultural factors interact to shape supernatural justice beliefs, and how the particular beliefs that people hold exert unique effects on cognition and behavior. Throughout this chapter, we have raised several novel hypotheses worthy of future research and described how existing theories of religion and justice can fruitfully be extended to explain a variety of worldviews that are prevalent in diverse cultures around the world.