When you hear that someone got laid off, lost the house, or came down with something serious, watch where your mind goes first. It reaches for what they did wrong. Should have saved more. Should have seen it coming. Should not have trusted that guy. Often this happens before you know a single real detail about the case.
This is the just-world belief, the deep assumption that people basically get what they deserve. Psychologists have put it under a microscope. In a set of well-known experiments, Melvin Lerner had people watch someone apparently receive painful electric shocks for no reason the victim could control. The observers could not stop the suffering and could not change the situation. Faced with plainly undeserved pain, they did not conclude that the world was unfair. They started to rate the victim as less worthy, as someone who must, somehow, have had it coming. The more helpless and innocent the suffering looked, the harder people worked to find the victim's flaw.
The belief survives because it is doing a job. If bad things land on people for no reason, then bad things can land on you for no reason, and that is a frightening way to walk around. So we keep the world fair inside our heads by quietly assigning fault. The same move flatters the people on top, since if outcomes are deserved then their good fortune is earned, and it lets the comfortable off the hook, because if the poor chose their lot then no one else owes them anything.
The honest objection is that effort and choices genuinely do matter. Sometimes people really did bring the trouble on themselves, and pretending otherwise is its own convenient story, the one a person tells to avoid looking at their own part. That is true, and it has a mirror image. There is a flattery in which nothing is ever your fault and the system did all of it. Both versions are comfortable. The tell is the same in both directions, which is whichever account costs the believer nothing. The secure reach for desert, the stuck reach for fate, and each picks the reading that leaves them blameless.
So the thing to catch is not the careful judgment after you know the facts. It is the verdict that arrives early, aimed at someone whose luck was clearly worse than yours. That speed is the giveaway. You are not weighing the case. You are protecting yourself from the possibility that the floor under you is not as solid as you need it to be.
The world is partly fair and partly not. You cannot tell which part you are looking at by measuring how badly you need it to be the first one.