Why We Think We Deserve Good Karma—And Others Don’t

For thousands of years, people have waited on karma to catch up with their good behavior—or promised it would roll around for anyone who crossed them. The lure of karmic thinking is that if you do good things, positive outcomes will rain down on you, while the opposite is true for those who don’t uphold the same standard of morals. In other words: You reap what you sow.

“It’s a fairly common belief—at least the general idea that there’s a bigger force outside of human beings, like a cosmic force that ensures that in the long run, good things happen to good people, and bad things happen to bad people,” says Cindel White, an assistant professor of social and personality psychology at York University in Toronto who has long studied karma. Despite the fact that so many people subscribe to this supernatural belief system, researchers still don’t know a lot about it, including “how that belief looks in their daily life, how they feel about it, and how they think about it,” she says.

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