This, 100%. How people view the homeless (as a group, if not individually) is the quintessential, textbook example of just-world fallacy.
And your interpretation that it is a coping mechanism is also accurate. People need to resolve the cognitive dissonance of “I’m a good person, and good people help the homeless, but I’m not helping the homeless for X,Y,Z (possibly legitimate) reasons”. One of the easiest ways to resolve that is the just-world fallacy
This, 100%. How people view the homeless (as a group, if not individually) is the quintessential, textbook example of just-world fallacy.
And your interpretation that it is a coping mechanism is also accurate. People need to resolve the cognitive dissonance of “I’m a good person, and good people help the homeless, but I’m not helping the homeless for X,Y,Z (possibly legitimate) reasons”. One of the easiest ways to resolve that is the just-world fallacy