[vhawk01]

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Joyce says. "But more important than that, we learned a priceless lesson: If you do what is right, God takes care of you."

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This really bothers me, because it reflects a bias that is present in our culture: "Good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people." This is a real bias and studies have been done showing this. Therefore when bad things happen to other people there is an unfair (unless you agree with Joyce) bias toward thinking that they deserved it.

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This may not be a true bias. Good and bad seem to hit everyone. Its just people take comfort in saying this.

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Its a true bias. It isn't even an incorrect bias, qualitatively speaking. I would be willing to bet that, all else being equal, good people have more success in their lives than bad people (good and bad defined by some consensus survey on what traits each has, I don't really care what the definition is). Where the bias comes in is that most people VASTLY overestimate this correlation. Good things happen to good people more often, but bad things happen to good people A WHOLE LOT. Just slightly less than to bad people. So much so that its nearly useless to try and use one thing (goodness of people or goodness of result) to guess at the other. THAT is where the bias comes in, how strongly people think this correlation is.

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Well its pretty hard to quantify this...You do have the peer groups people hang out in and environment playing major roles. Plus everyone's bias/perception will vary and how could you ever measure it unless you conducted some kind of worldwide census...even then regional views are bound to affect the results and who's to say they shouldn't you are trying to determine the scope of the bias and underlying reasons for it. A lot of people do like to use that karma phrase "what goes around comes around" in the West not sure about other parts of the world.

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Yeah I think they do research and everything! Maybe even use a calculator or a stopwatch or something.