Reprints and permission:

People are often expected to focus on the future, strive for long-term goals, and delay gratification (Martin, 1999). However, in the present article, we argue that such a future orientation will make people more intolerant of personal uncertainty (Van den Bos, 2001, 2009). In particular, we propose that people will try to make this personal uncer-tainty tolerable by adopting the belief that the world is a just and deserving place and, hence, trust that their efforts will pay off in the end (Lerner, 1980). We further note that, para-doxically, adopting and adhering to the belief in a just world (BJW) can have negative effects, such as being harsher to people who innocently fell victim to a crime. In the current line of research, we investigate whether focusing on the future indeed leads to heightened intolerance of personal uncertainty and whether this intolerance underlies harshe