The ‘Just World’ bias

Our brains have evolved to assume that the world is a fair place, even if the actual evidence for this doesn’t stack up. Our brains respond to perceived fairness and justice like they do to raised social status: they really like it.

So, when someone we deem to be higher status, who perhaps achieved their status via means we deem to be unfair, comes a cropper and experiences appropriate failure and misfortune, in ways that lower their standing relative to our own, it produces a heady cocktail of status and fairness, at zero cost to us.