The Just-World Fallacy

I'm depressed. Want to be depressed, too? I've got just the thing.

The “just-world fallacy” is a cognitive bias — a feeling more than an idea — that people get what they deserve. The rich and beautiful must be wonderful, even if their goodness is not immediately evident, while those who suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune must have done something to bring it on themselves. Maybe they’re dim, or lazy, or cruel, or profane. Whatever. It’s their fault. Somehow or other.

You may scoff at this idea. You may find it callous and obtuse. But abundant research shows that people really are inclined to judge others as if the world rewards the good and punishes the wicked. This tendency has been found across cultures and societies. Researchers have also found that belief in a just world tends to correlate with greater life satisfaction, leading some to conclude that belief in a just world protects against depression and is thus an essential element of mental health.

Now there’s a happy thought: We can either blame victims for their miseries or be plunged into depression by the knowledge that the universe is indifferent (to quote Don Draper.)

As the reader may have gathered, I am as confident that invisible forces ensure justice in this life as I am sure that spirits slip money under the pillows of children who loose teeth. And, yes, that depresses me. Thanks for asking.

So today, I will share two crushing stories of people who deserved much better than they got.

You could reasonably ask why I am doing this to you. And I could provide an elaborate rationale based on the importance of seeing things as they are.

But the truth is I only recently came across these stories, they unsettled me, and misery loves company.

I hope you enjoy them as much as I did.

Edsel Ford

First up is the tale of a man born into vast wealth and privilege. Sounds like a happy story, doesn’t it? Do not let your guard down.

Edsel Ford was nine years old when his father, Henry, founded what became the Ford Motor Company. By the time the younger Ford was twenty, the company was a colossus and his father was revered across the United States and around the world.

As the prince who would inherit one of the mighty kingdoms of the 20th century, it would not have been terribly surprising if Edsel had become spoiled and arrogant. He was neither.

A serious young man, Edsel was unfailingly polite, sensitive, and thoughtful toward others. People invariably called him a “gentleman.” His great passions later in life were art and philanthropy, both of which he supported generously.

When Edsel went to work for his father’s company, he proved to be focused, a hard worker, and a keen student of the modern management techniques essential for a sprawling organization like the Ford Motor Company. In 1919, Henry Ford named Edsel president of the company, with the understanding that while the elder Ford would not run day-to-day operations he would continue to oversee the big picture.

Edsel did the job marvellously. He promoted teamwork. His decisions were always informed and careful. His eye for design was sharp. And always he treated everyone, at every level, with respect. As Henry Ford became increasingly impulsive, obstinate, and autocratic, many executives said the fact that Edsel would one day be in charge was the only reason they stayed with the company.

By the early 1920s, Ford had been selling hordes of Model Ts for more than a decade and the company was at its zenith, but Ford’s much smaller rival, General Motors, had learned from Ford and introduced many innovations of its own, notably a wider variety of models, in different price ranges, with models changed annually. Ford wasn’t innovating at all. Edsel Ford saw that despite his company’s giant lead, and gushing profits, Ford was actually falling behind and would eventually suffer. He pushed to get the company innovating.

Henry Ford blocked him. The elder Ford was a classic hedgehog — a man with only one big idea — and he didn’t see any reason why the company should change a thing about his beloved Model T. Edsel insisted. Henry slapped him down.

“Slapped” is barely a metaphor. Henry Ford could be brusque and rude with subordinates but he treated no one as badly as he treated Edsel. Henry publicly belittled his son. He countermanded his directions. He pitted subordinates against him. Henry Ford once deliberately allowed construction authorized by Edsel to be completed so it would be all the more humiliating when the elder Ford ordered it torn down.

The father’s cruelty had a purpose. Henry saw Edsel’s thoughtfulness, decency, and inclusive style as weakness — to his dying day he never understood that one-man rule was crippling for a vast and complex enterprise — and he thought these psychological beatings would toughen the boy, making him more like his domineering father.

They never did. Edsel Ford remained a gentleman.

Edsel also kept getting the big calls right, while Henry Ford kept getting them wrong — and slapping down his son.

By the mid-1920s, it was obvious that General Motors would soon do the unthinkable and overtake the once-dominant Ford. Edsel implored his father to let work on new models go ahead. Henry dismissed him. Only when the evidence was overwhelming, and Ford executives were almost in open revolt, did the father finally concede and permit the development of the new Model A. The long delay meant everything was done in a mad rush and the company’s entire production had to be shut down for six months as it retooled.

When the Great Depression hit, sales fell and Ford suffered labour unrest. Edsel believed unions were inevitable in modern industry and he urged his father to negotiate with the United Auto Workers. Henry took that advice as further evidence of his son’s weakness. He put Harry Bennett in charge of labour relations.

Bennett was the elder Ford’s long-time personal assistant and enforcer. More to the point, Bennett was a mob-connected thug whose preferred negotiation techniques were pointing guns and cracking skulls. Inevitably, Bennett’s goonish behaviour enraged workers, sparking the 1937 “Battle of the Overpass,” a bloody fracas captured by news photographers whose cameras Bennett’s gangsters tried and failed to confiscate. When the photos were published, the company’s public reputation collapsed. Henry Ford was finally forced to negotiate with the UAW, as Edsel had wanted all along — except now Ford negotiated in an atmosphere of bitterness and from a position of weakness.

In 1940, Edsel Ford negotiated an agreement with Great Britain to build Rolls-Royce engines desperately needed for the fight against Nazi Germany. This was done with Henry Ford’s permission and publicly announced. Then, without warning his son, the elder Ford informed reporters he was cancelling the deal. Edsel Ford was left to stammer excuses.

The long years of abuse finally wore the son down. Edsel became sullen and withdrawn.

When Edsel developed stomach troubles, and doctors told him to reduce work, Henry scoffed and insisted Edsel follow a restorative regimen invented by Henry — who was a devotee of quack medicine and confident that any intuition he had about practically anything must be God’s own truth.

When Edsel started to suffer high fevers and headaches, doctors diagnosed undulant fever, a then-incurable disease contracted from drinking unpasteurized milk. The source of the milk was Edsel’s father: One of Henry Ford’s many crankish beliefs was that unpasteurized milk was safer and healthier, and he insisted that others drink it.

As Edsel’s health declined, the elder Ford — in keeping with the just-world fallacy — blamed his son. Henry became still more abusive and furiously demanded Edsel change his lifestyle to the father’s liking.

Edsel Ford died of stomach cancer in 1943. He was 49 years old.

Henry Ford died in 1947.

But fate wasn’t done with poor Edsel.

In 1956, Ford’s management decided the company needed not only new models but a new mid-range division and brand. The company invested massively in the new venture, while its marketing division searched high and low for a name, even going so far as to hire Pulitzer-winning poet Marianne Moore. (Moore offered such gems as the “Ford Faberge” and the “Utopian Turtletop.”) Nothing worked. Finally, executives thought they should honour the widely respected and distinctively monikered late president of Ford.

Edsel Ford’s wife and children didn’t like the idea but Ford executives pushed them until they gave their permission.

Edsels started rolling off assembly lines just as the American economy slipped into recession. And consumer reaction was cold. The public hated the designs of the Edsels, a bitter twist given that Edsel Ford had loved car design and had been responsible for many successful innovations.

After two years, Ford scrapped the new brand. In modern money, the loss was measured in the billions of dollars.

Thanks to those executives, “Edsel” entered the American vernacular. For decades, “Edsel” was a synonym for a complete, ruinous failure.

For a good man whose many successes were buried beneath the contempt of an unrelenting father, it was the final indignity.

J.P. Morgan Junior (l) and Senior

Like Edsel Ford, John Pierpont Morgan Junior was the child of a wildly successful son of a bitch. But unlike Edsel Ford, J.P. Morgan Jr. emerged from his father’s shadow to become a successful son of a bitch in his own right.

During the First World War, when the United States was still neutral, Morgan profited handsomely from the catastrophe in Europe, both with loans to combatants and by making his firm the American purchasing agent for the British government — a role which allowed him to pocket a tidy one percent commission on the massive quantities of American cotton, steel, chemicals and food shipped overseas.

Morgan preferred to avoid the limelight but war profiteering on that scale made him notorious nonetheless. More lucrative chicanery followed in the Roaring Twenties. Like his father before him, J.P. Morgan Jr. became the embodiment of Wall Street greed. Which was good when the twenties were roaring. But not so good when the Great Depression arrived.

In 1932, the US Senate created the “Pecora Commission” to investigate the causes of the crash of 1929. As the now-despised face of Wall Street, Morgan was called to testify.

On June 1st, the conference room was teeming as politicians, lawyers, aides, and reporters gathered.

A tiny woman — an employee of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus — walked up to officials from Morgan’s bank, shook hands, then turned and extended her hand to J.P. Morgan himself.

Morgan laughed, stood, shook her hand, and sat back down.

A man — who turned out to be a press agent for the circus — emerged from the crowd, scooped up the woman, and put here in J.P. Morgan’s lap.

Morgan was flummoxed.

An awkward conversation followed.

“I have a grandson bigger than you,” he said.

“But I’m older,” Graf replied.

“How old are you?”

She said she was 20, although she later told reporters she was 31.

“Where do you live?” Morgan asked.

“In a tent, sir.”

From an Associated Press story:

After once being on the banker’s lap, the midget slid slowly down then climbed back. Spectators roared with laughter; and before long Morgan was also in good humor again chatting with his partners.

The circus agent finally piloted the diminutive Miss Graf away.

“Oh, yes, I like Mr. Morgan,” she squeaked as she left to rejoin her circus comrades.

Despite a warning from the head of the committee that any newspaper that ran a photo of the stunt would be barred, the picture of the “millionaire and the midget” was instantly famous the world over. It became a cultural touchstone. Anyone alive at the time remembered it forever.

This strange little story is, of course, a distasteful reminder of a time when laughing at people in “freak shows” was wholesome family entertainment. But that’s not the depressing injustice I promised you.

Despite her aplomb in the Senate, Lya Graf was a sensitive woman who hated being the weird sort of celebrity the stunt made her. In 1935, she left the United States and returned to her native country.

Which was Germany. And 1935 was two years after the Nazis had come to power.

Nazi eugenics saw people with dwarfism as unfit biological mistakes. Worse, Lya Graf was half-Jewish. According to New Yorker writer John Brooks, Graf was arrested in 1937 and sent to Auschwitz in 1941. That is where the record ends.

The encounter that morning in 1933 ended differently for J.P. Morgan Jr.

As John Brooks wrote:

Morgan, and even Wall Street as a whole, profited adventitiously from the encounter. From that day forward until his death a decade later, he was in the public mind no longer a grasping devil whose greed and ruthlessness had helped bring the nation to near ruin, but rather a benign old dodderer. The change in attitude was instantaneous, and Morgan took advantage of it, seizing, whether by calculation or instinct, on further chances to “humanize” himself.

The just-world fallacy is more often called the “just-world hypothesis.” But I’ll stick with “fallacy.”

Given the abundant evidence that the world does not deliver lollipops to the good children and lumps of coal to the wicked, “fallacy” is clearly the mot juste.