Sometimes bad things happen to good people. Maybe most of the time even, it's hard to know, and even harder to create common knowledge on the topic because if it is so we don't want to know, and tell stories to cover it up when it happens.

Back in the golden age of psychology, long before the replication crisis, the scientific method was understood very differently from today. Effect sizes were expected to be visible with the naked eye, not just statistically significant, and practices such as IRBs, peer review and even the use of control groups were much more optional. For instance, the original Milgram Experiment lacked a control group, bur instead of saying that nothing had been learned, or suppressing it on dubious ethical grounds, the psychological community investigated an enormous number of variations on the Milgram experiment in order to tease out the impacts of slight variations, which were statistically compared with one another.

In 1965 Melvin J. Lerner discovered that experimental subjects disliked the people who they saw subjected to electric shocks. This effect was alleviated when the experimental subjects were able to offer the presumed victims appropriate compensation. Apparently, they wanted to make the situation fair. Unfortunately, if they couldn't make it fair with compensation they wanted to make it fair by claiming that the victim deserved it. Lerner and others followed up with a series of investigations victim blaming. They discovered that the phenomenon is pervasive, robust and measurable via psychological surveys. When given a story about a date, higher scores in 'Belief in a just world' are associated with a greater tendency to see whatever ending the reader is given as following with high probability from the earlier events even if the earlier events are identical while the endings differ.

"Might people on the internet sometimes lie?... If you’re like me, and you want to respond to this post with “but how do you know that person didn’t just experience a certain coincidence or weird psychological trick?”, then before you comment take a second to ask why the “they’re lying” theory is so hard to believe. And when you figure it out, tell me, because I really want to know."

-- Slate Star Codex, 12/12/2016

One advantage of just world belief is that it makes it much easier to believe anything a

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Just World Hypothesis