Most people believe they deserve good karma more than others

The concept of karma has deep roots across cultures and religions. It promises that moral actions will eventually bring fitting consequences – good deeds yield rewards, and bad ones lead to punishment.

For many, this belief adds meaning and structure to life’s random events. When fortune smiles or tragedy strikes, karma offers an explanation that feels fair and satisfying.

But beneath this comforting idea lies a curious paradox. While people often believe in karma as a universal law of justice, they don’t apply it equally to themselves and to others.

Instead, they use it in ways that serve different psychological needs – self-esteem on the one hand, and a sense of justice on the other.

Recent research from York University, published by the American Psychological Association, explores this phenomenon in depth. The study reveals how karma becomes a mirror for self-worth and a judgment tool for others’ misfortunes.

Karma for me, justice for you

A research team led by Cindel White conducted three large studies with more than 2,000 participants across the United States, India, and Singapore. They examined how people described karmic events in their lives compared to those in others’ lives.

The results pointed to a consistent psychological pattern: when people think about karma in their own life, they recall positive experiences that feel earned. When thinking about others, they tend to describe misfortunes and punishments.

In the first study, 86 percent of participants wrote about events in their own lives. Most of these events were positive and interpreted as rewards for good actions.

However, when participants chose to write about others, 92 percent focused on negative outcomes. This contrast wasn’t subtle – it showed up in their language, emotional tone, and evaluations of who deserved what.

“We found very similar patterns across multiple cultural contexts, including Western samples, where we know people often think about themselves in exaggeratedly positive ways, and samples from Asian countries where people are more likely to be self-critical,” said White.

Psychological needs shape karma thinking

The divide makes sense when viewed through the lens of psychological motivation. People want to see themselves as good, competent, and deserving of success.

This is known as self-enhancement. When something good happens, attributing it to karmic merit boosts one’s self-image. The thinking is simple: I must have done something right.

But when bad things happen to others, a different motive comes into play. People also want to believe the world is fair. The belief in a just world helps explain suffering and reduces the discomfort of seeing innocent people in pain.

In that context, karma becomes a convenient explanation for misfortune – those people must have done something wrong.

“Thinking about karma allows people to take personal credit and feel pride in good things that happen to them even when it isn’t clear exactly what they did to create the good outcome, but it also allows people to see other people’s suffering as justified retribution,” White explained.

Cultural background matters

The researchers didn’t stop at general trends. They wanted to know whether this self-other gap in karma interpretation varied across cultures. Study participants came from religiously diverse backgrounds: American Christians, nonreligious people, Indian Hindus, and Singaporean Buddhists.

As expected, the bias was strongest among Americans. Seventy-one percent described their own karma-related experiences as positive, while only 18 percent saw others’ experiences that way. In contrast, Indian and Singaporean participants were less likely to frame their own experiences so positively.

In Singapore, only 52 percent did so. This aligns with previous research showing that self-enhancement is more common in individualistic cultures like the U.S., and less so in collectivist cultures that value modesty and self-criticism.

Still, the same general pattern held everywhere. Even in cultures with deep-rooted karmic traditions, people were more likely to think of others’ misfortunes as punishment and their own blessings as earned rewards.

Emotion, memory, and power of narrative

The research team used both human coders and computer sentiment analysis to examine how people described karmic events. The emotional tone of the stories was strikingly different depending on who the story was about.

Descriptions of self-related karma were more upbeat, containing more positive words and emotional language. In contrast, stories about others were often colder, more negative, and less nuanced.

In Study 3, participants were also asked to rate how they felt about these events. Those recalling their own karmic experiences reported more pride, optimism, and contentment.

They also felt stronger emotions overall. This suggests that thinking about karma can do more than explain events – it can reinforce identity, shape memory, and even regulate feelings.

Importantly, even participants who denied believing in karma showed similar patterns. This points to an implicit bias in how people interpret life events, suggesting that karma functions as more than a religious belief – it acts as a psychological framework, deeply woven into how people make sense of the world.

Seeing the good in ourselves

These studies add to a broader body of work on self-serving attributions. People tend to explain their own successes as a result of internal qualities like talent or effort, while attributing failures to outside forces. When it comes to karma, this self-protective tendency shows up as an overemphasis on personal virtue.

At the same time, people are more willing to blame others for their misfortunes. This may stem from a desire to protect the belief that the world is fair. If others suffer due to bad karma, then justice has been served. This logic, while comforting, can also lead to victim-blaming and moral disengagement.

The research also found that people viewed themselves as more moral than others, saw their own karmic outcomes as more deserved, and were quicker to attribute negative karma to others’ actions than to their own.

This confirms that belief in karma, while seemingly spiritual and impartial, can be used in biased, self-protective ways.

Finding life meaning through karma

While the idea of karma has ancient roots, its modern function appears more psychological than theological.

Karma gives people a way to interpret good and bad events when other explanations fail. It offers a path to take credit, protect self-esteem, and explain injustice without confronting randomness or chance.

“This satisfies various personal motives – to see oneself as good and deserving of good fortune, and to see justice in other people’s suffering – and supernatural beliefs like karma might be especially good at satisfying these motives when other, more secular explanations fail,” noted White.

Even in an age of science and reason, these findings show that people still lean on supernatural thinking to make sense of their world. Karma remains powerful, not just because it explains things, but because it does so in a way that protects the self and affirms a moral universe.

When beliefs shape reality

The researchers caution that while most participants believe karma applies equally to everyone, their actual thinking shows otherwise.

Positive experiences are more quickly linked to one’s own past virtues. Negative events are often assigned to others’ misdeeds. This pattern has consequences beyond personal comfort. It shapes how we judge others, form opinions, and decide who is worthy of help or blame.

These findings raise important questions about how beliefs shape perception. Karma, like many supernatural concepts, doesn’t just sit passively in the background. It actively colors how people interpret events, make moral judgments, and understand themselves in relation to others.

While karma may claim to be impartial, the way people invoke it is anything but. Its moral logic bends to the needs of the believer – rewarding the self and punishing the other.

The study is published in the journal Psychology of Religion and Spirituality.

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