Just-world hypothesis (belief in a just world)

Biological Parallel

Cleaner wrasse fish punish 'cheating' clients who eat parasites but don't offer cleaning access to others—the cheaters get worse service next time. This creates a just-world within the reef: cooperation is rewarded, defection punished, and outcomes track behavior. The system works because interactions are repeated and reputation travels. The hypothesis fails when extended to non-social domains: a turtle killed by random storm surge didn't 'deserve' death, but humans often impose moral causality on amoral natural events. Organizations inherit this bias: attributing layoffs to performance when they're often arbitrary responses to market chaos.