After his Ph.D., he was a Post-Doc in Clinical Psychology at
Stanford University. Lerner has been associated with
University of California, Berkeley,
Washington University in St. Louis, Universities of
Utrecht and
Leiden in the Netherlands, and other institutions. He was the founding editor of the journal
Social Justice Research and the "Critical Issues in Social Justice" series published by
Plenum Press. In 1994, he was awarded Distinguished Professor Emeritus at
University of Waterloo. He received the Max-Planck-Forschungspreis together with Leo Montada in 1993 and the Quinquennial Award in 1986. In 2008, he was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the
International Society for Justice Research.
Belief in a just world Lerner is most recognized for the
Just-world phenomenon, published in "The Belief in a Just World: A Fundamental Delusion" (1980), and for being co-editor of the first volume devoted to the "Justice Motive" in 1981. He began studying
justice beliefs and the just world fallacy while exploring the mechanisms behind negative social and societal interactions. Lerner saw his work as extending
Stanley Milgram's work on
obedience. He wanted to understand how regimes that cause cruelty and suffering maintain popular support, and how people come to accept
social norms and laws that produce misery and suffering. Lerner's research was influenced by repeatedly witnessing the tendency of observers to
blame victims for their suffering. During his clinical training as a psychologist, he observed the treatment of mentally ill persons by the health care practitioners with whom he worked. Though he knew the clinicians to be kindhearted, educated people, he observed that they blamed patients for their own suffering. He was also surprised at hearing his students derogate the poor, seemingly oblivious to the
structural forces that contribute to poverty. His desire to understand the processes that caused these phenomena led Lerner to conduct his first experiments on what is now called the just world fallacy. ==See also==