For thousands of years, people have waited on karma to catch up with their good behavior—or promised it would roll around for anyone who crossed them. The lure of karmic thinking is that if you do good things, positive outcomes will rain down on you, while the opposite is true for those who don’t uphold the same standard of morals. In other words: You reap what you sow.

“It’s a fairly common belief—at least the general idea that there’s a bigger force outside of human beings, like a cosmic force that ensures that in the long run, good things happen to good people, and bad things happen to bad people,” says Cindel White, an assistant professor of social and personality psychology at York University in Toronto who has long studied karma. Despite the fact that so many people subscribe to this supernatural belief system, researchers still don’t know a lot about it, including “how that belief looks in their daily life, how they feel about it, and how they think about it,” she says.

That’s why, in a study published May 1 in the journal Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, White and her colleagues investigated how people’s psychological motivations drive their beliefs about karma. They found a rather self-serving distinction in exactly how those views play out: Across populations, when people think about their own karma, it tends to be quite positive. But when they consider how karma affects others? Well, let’s just say there are a lot of people who had it coming.

The enduring draw of karma
The concept of karma is rooted in the worldview of many Asian religious traditions, like Hinduism and Buddhism, but it’s also become prevalent in other places, including nonreligious communities. In the last couple years, it’s saturated pop-culture: Taylor Swift, Chappell Roan, and JoJo Siwa, among other artists, all released karma-themed songs. In Swift’s tune, she compares good karma to everything from her boyfriend to a cat purring in her lap because it loves her. “Karma's a relaxing thought,” she croons. “Aren't you envious that for you it's not?”