The ‘Instant Karma’ Online Page Documents Perfect Examples Of People Getting What They Deserve (52 Pics)

Meanwhile, becoming responsible for our actions can have the added benefit of making us stronger and more resilient. In his book, Lickerman alludes to a study led by psychologist Kurt Gray where participants would hold up a 5-pound weight, would be given a dollar, and half of then would be given the opportunity to donate it to charity. Donating the money made the participants able to hold up the weight 7 seconds longer than the control group.

“Why? According to Gray, because doing good increases our sense of agency, or potency, a phenomenon he terms moral transformation. (Interestingly, this effect wasn’t seen only with acts of charity but also with acts of villainy.) […] Which all suggests a reason that action in the moral sphere, whether good or evil, makes us strong: it requires us to be. Or, at least, that’s what we think people who take moral action are: research shows that we’re cognitively biased to ‘typecast’ people who take such action as resilient—-a bias, it turns out, that affects not only our perception of others but also of ourselves,” Lickerman writes.

“And when we perceive ourselves to be endowed with a particular quality, we have a tendency to conform to that perception. All of which implies that performing or even attempting to perform moral action may increase our resilience because it causes us to perceive ourselves as more resilient. This then makes us act, and therefore feel, as if we were.”