Examining the relationship between belief in a just world, anticipatory trust, and religious attitude

Justice is a phenomenon that is very important for people and manifests itself in different ways in every aspect of their lives. As long as people believe in the existence of justice, they look to the future with confidence and feel better about themselves. Trust, just like justice, is a situation that must be present in an individual's life and causes psychological distress in its absence. Religious attitudes also have an impact on the individual's life and behavior and shape the individual's social relations. All these variables together have not been examined in previous studies in the field of psychology of religion. The aim of this study is to examine the relationship between adult individuals' belief in a just world, expected trust and religious attitudes, taking into account some demographic variables (gender, education level, income level, age). The population of the study consists of 412 adults between the ages of 18-60 living in different provinces of Turkey. The scales used in the research were transformed into digital survey forms and delivered to the participants through social media platforms. In the study, the personal and general just world belief scale developed separately by Dalbert (1987, 1999) and adapted into Turkish by Göregenli (2003, Akt. Coşgun, 2010), the expected trust scale developed by Cunha and adapted into Turkish by Uymaz (2021), and the religious attitude scale developed by Ok (2011) were used. As a result of the study, significant relationships were found between the participants' levels of just world belief (personal, general just world belief), expected trust levels (expected ulterior motives, expected good intentions) and religious attitude levels (behavior, emotion, relationship, cognition). When demographic variables were taken into consideration, no significant difference was found between belief in a just world (except for the age variable) and demographic variables. While the relationship between expected trust and income level and age variables was found to be significant, no significant difference was found with other demographic variables. Significant differentiation was found between the religious attitude scale and all variables (except gender variable).