You get what you deserve, how the belief in a just world changes physiological response towards adverse stimuli.

According to Lerner’s Just World Theory (1980), during their life human beings are exposed to a plethora of experiences that shape their idea of a “Just World” which will have an important role in guiding them in their life’s choices. The present study aims to investigate the influence of individuals' perceptions of a just world and their moral values in the physiological response (the pupil dilation) towards adverse stimuli. For this purpose, an ad hoc experiment was conducted where participants were primed to see the world as just or unjust using a framing technique and asked to look at a set of images representing negative events happening all over the world. Participant’s morality was also assessed using the Moral Foundation Questionnaire (Graham et al., 2008). Although there was no main effect of the type of framing (just world/unjust world) on pupil dilation, a two-way interaction shows that participants who gave more importance to binding foundations had a greater response (a constriction of the pupil, that is a type of activation, Bradley et al., 2006) towards adverse stimuli when they see the world as unjust. Possible present and future implications are discussed.