Synergistic Person x Situation Interaction in Distributive Justice Behavior (original) (raw)
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Synergistic person×situation interaction in distributive justice judgment and allocation behaviour
Personality and Individual Differences, 2004
Traditional models of distributive justice behaviour have focused predominantly on either personspecific or context-specific explanations. We suggest supplementing these models by including interaction effects between functionally equivalent situation and person factors. Two experiments were conducted to replicate results from a previous vignette experiment in which the effect of situational information that would justify an unequal distribution of burdens was lower for individuals with a positive attitude toward the equality principle than for individuals with a negative attitude toward this principle. The results of the present experiments are consistent with this finding. Again, situational information that would justify an unequal distribution of outcomes had a weaker effect for participants with a favourable attitude toward equality than for participants with an unfavourable attitude. Based on these results and results from other research domains, we concluded that the synergistic person · situation interaction is a general phenomenon that deserves more attention in theory and research. Several cognitive mechanisms, such as motivated perception, selective attention, and the availability of attitude-congruent situation schemas that may account for synergistic interactions in justice behaviour are discussed.
Procedural and Distributive Justice Effects: The Role of Social Context
1985
Distributive justice deals with the fairness of outcomes or rewards while procedural justice deals with the fairness of the rules and processes involved in the distribution of rewards. Two studies were conducted to examine the influen:e of different social contexts on the effects of procedural (PF) and distributive (DF) fairness. College students (N-584) in the first study read a story describing a college situation in which a professor allocated a course grade to a student. In the second study, college students (Na192) read a story describing a supervisor allocating a pay increase to a worker. The school study used three PF levels; the work study used two PF levels, and both studies used three DF levels. After reading the stories, subjects completed questionnaires which included measures of nine dependent variables. The results indicated that: (1) both PF and DF had strong effects on the affective and social responses studied; (2) PF had much greater influence than DF in the work context, but not in the school context; and (3) the relative impact of PF vesus DF varied for different social and affective responses. These findings suggest that PF is quite important and that justice research and theory dealing only with DF is seriously incomplete. The findings also suggest that ,cial and allocation context may influence the roles of PF and DF in their relative impact on social and affective responses. (NRB)
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1996
Illusory correlations in procedural justice were investigated in 2 experiments. After receiving information describing the fair and unfair treatment of 2 groups' members by police, participants judged the fairness of each group's treatment. Illusory correlations formed in both experiments, resulting in erroneous associations between the smaller group and the infrequent type of treatment. In Experiment 2, participants made harsher guilt judgments of members of the group perceived as receiving relatively favorable treatment. Mediational evidence suggests that differences in guilt judgments reflected attempts to compensate for perceived injustice, creating real differences in group treatment. The benefit of incorporating cognitive biases in models of procedural justice is discussed.
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 1998
The research literature in organizational justice has examined in some detail the dynamics and consequences of justice judgments based on direct experiences with fair and unfair authorities, but little is known about how people form justice judgments on the basis of reports of injustice by others or how group discussion changes justice judgments. The present study examined the consequences of distributed injustice, in which all members of a group experience some denial of voice, and concentrated injustice, in which one member experiences repeated denial of voice and others do not. It was predicted and found that mild personal experiences of injustice are a more potent source of group impressions of injustice than are reports of more severe injustice experienced by others. In both conditions, group ratings of unfairness were more extreme than were the mean of individual ratings either before or after discussion. ᭧ 1998 Academic Press
Why do people care about justice? How do people reason about what is fair or unfair? To answer these questions, justice researchers have developed theories of justice reasoning based on their assumptions about people's needs, desires, and motivations. For example, theories of social exchange assume people are rationally self-interested and will evaluate fairness through the lens of maximizing rewards. Alternatively, theories of procedural fairness assume people fundamentally need to belong to groups and will focus on the fairness of procedures as an indication of their worth to the group. Moral theories of justice reasoning assume people have fundamental beliefs about right and wrong and that people evaluate fairness in accordance with these beliefs. This chapter reviews these three theoretical perspectives and integrates them into a contingency theory of justice. The contingency theory of justice posits that how people define fairness depends on the current perspective of the perceiver (material, social, or moral perspective). Specifically, we propose that the perspective and motivations of the perceiver impact the factors people use to decide whether something is fair or unfair. The contingency theory of justice can account for the complexity and flexibility of people's justice reasoning, and how justice judgments vary both between and within persons over time. Additionally, the theory suggests that an important area of future research inquiry is exploring how people cope with differences in their fairness judgments, and how they resolve conflicts and arrive at consensus that everyone can agree is fair.
Justice sensitivity and the processing of justice-related information
European Journal of Personality, 2011
We investigated how Justice Sensitivity (JS) shapes the processing of justice–related information. We proposed that due to frequently perceiving and ruminating about injustices, persons high in JS develop highly accessible and differentiated injustice concepts that shape attention, interpretation and memory for justice–related information. Three studies provided evidence for these assumptions. After witnessing injustice, persons high in JS attended more strongly to unjust stimuli than to negative control stimuli (Study1) and interpreted an ambiguous situation as less just than persons low in JS (Study2). Finally, they displayed a memory advantage for unjust information (Study3). Results suggest that JS involves the availability and accessibility of injustice concepts as parameters of cognitive functioning and offer explanations for effects of JS on justice–related behaviour. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Fairness violations elicit greater punishment on behalf of another than for oneself
Nature communications, 2014
Classic psychology and economic studies argue that punishment is the standard response to violations of fairness norms. Typically, individuals are presented with the option to punish the transgressor or not. However, such a narrow choice set may fail to capture stronger alternative preferences for restoring justice. Here we show, in contrast to the majority of findings on social punishment, that other forms of justice restoration (for example, compensation to the victim) are strongly preferred to punitive measures. Furthermore, these alternative preferences for restoring justice depend on the perspective of the deciding agent. When people are the recipient of an unfair offer, they prefer to compensate themselves without seeking retribution, even when punishment is free. Yet when people observe a fairness violation targeted at another, they change their decision to the most punitive option. Together these findings indicate that humans prefer alternative forms of justice restoration t...
An Empirical Inquiry into the Relation of Corrective Justice to Distributive Justice
2006
We report the results of three experiments examining the long-standing debate within tort theory over whether corrective justice is independent of, or parasitic on, distributive justice. Using a "hypothetical societies" paradigm that serves as an impartial reasoning device and permits experimental manipulation of societal conditions, we first tested support for corrective justice in a society where individual merit played no role in determining economic standing. Participants expressed strong support for a norm of corrective justice in response to intentional and unintentional torts in both just and unjust societies. The second experiment tested support for corrective justice in a society where race, rather than individual merit, determined economic standing. The distributive justice manipulation exerted greater effect here, particularly on liberal participants, but support for corrective justice remained strong among non-liberal participants, even against a background of racially unjust distributive conditions. The third experiment partially replicated the first experiment and found that the availability of government-funded insurance had little effect on demands for corrective justice. Overall, the results suggest that, while extreme distributive injustice can moderate support for corrective justice, the norm of corrective justice often dominates judgments about compensatory duties associated with tortious harms.