The Psychology of Justice and Legitimacy

D. Ramona Bobocel, Aaron C. Kay, Mark P. Zanna, James M. Olson, D. Ramona Bobocel, Aaron C. Kay, Mark P. Zanna, James M. Olson

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781136872068
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In response to the international turmoil, violence, and increasing ideological polarization, social psychological interest in the topics of legitimacy and social justice has blossomed considerably. Social psychologists have explored the psychological underpinnings of people's reactions to injustice and illegitimacy, including the behavioral and psychological consequences of the motivation to view individual outcomes and governmental systems as just and legitimate.

Although injustice and illegitimacy are clearly related at conceptual and theoretical levels, these two rich literatures are rarely integrated. Social justice researchers have focused on how people make sense of particular instances of injustice, whereas legitimacy researchers have tended to focus primarily on people's reactions to unfair systems of intergroup relations.

This 11th volume of the Ontario Symposium series brings together the work of leading researchers in fields of social justice and legitimacy to facilitate the cross-pollination and integration of these fields. The contributions address broad theoretical issues and cutting-edge empirical advances, while illustrating the diversity and richness of research in the two fields. By uniting these two domains, this volume will stimulate new directions in theory and research that seek to explain how and why people make sense of injustice at all levels of analysis.

CHAPTER 1

Knitting Together an Elephant

An Integrative Approach to Understanding
the Psychology of Justice Reasoning

LINDA J. SKITKA, NICHOLAS P. ARAMOVICH,
BRAD L. LYTLE AND EDWARD G. SARGIS

University of Illinois at Chicago

Abstract: 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, the authors 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. In addition, 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 a consensus that everyone can agree is fair.

Keywords: justice, fairness, morality, moralis, contingency theory

Theories that have attempted to explain why people care about fairness and the factors that people use to decide whether fairness has been achieved have a rich and vibrant history dating back to the earliest philosophers. Moreover, over time, modern social psychological inquiry into questions of how people decide whether something is fair or unfair, and the consequences of these judgments, has already cycled through a number of different major shifts in theoretical focus. One goal of the current chapter is to provide a brief historical overview of psychological justice theory and research focusing on three major metaphors that have guided various shifts in research focus and attention: (a) homo economicus, that is, a metaphor of human motivation focused on what people “get” out of social relationships; (b) homo socialis, that is, a metaphor of human motivation focused less on material goals and outcomes and instead on people’s need for status, for standing, and to belong; and (c) a relatively new metaphor for thinking about fairness, homo moralis, that is, that people are sometimes motivated to enforce or live up to their core conceptions of moral right and wrong (cf. Skitka, Bauman, & Mullen, 2008). To a considerable degree, justice theorists present these different metaphors for human motivation as competing, rather than complementary, accounts for what people most care about and therefore as competing conceptions of the factors people weigh most heavily when deciding whether something is fair or unfair.

A second and more ambitious goal of this chapter is to generate a more general model of justice reasoning that integrates these different perspectives into a greater theoretical whole. The working premise of our contingency model of justice is that people are both flexible and complex and that human psychology is not driven by single motives or frames of reference. Sometimes people will be concerned about maximizing material gain, other times they will be more concerned about their social status and standing in the group, and yet other times they will be concerned about neither of these things and will be motivated by living up to or defending personal conceptions of the moral good. How they define what is fair or unfair, and the factors that will weigh most heavily in their fairness judgments, will vary as a function of which perceptual frame of reference they currently see as most relevant to the situation at hand. Before going into further details about the contingency theory of justice we propose here, we first provide some historical context and background for it.

Metaphors Guiding Justice Research: A Brief Historical Overview

Research in the psychological and social sciences is often guided by initial assumptions, or guiding metaphors, about human nature (Lakatos, 1978). Guiding metaphors strongly influence what is to be observed and scrutinized, what questions are considered interesting and important, how these questions are to be structured, as well as how the results of scientific investigations are interpreted (Kuhn, 1962). As briefly mentioned earlier, one can argue that various programs of justice research have tended to be guided by different assumptions about the key motives that drive human behavior and therefore that shape how people think about fairness and why they care about it. We briefly review three of these programs of theory and research next.

Homo Economicus: Justice as Social Exchange

The metaphor of homo economicus, that is, the idea that people are rationally self-interested utility maximizers, represented a hard-core assumption of classic social exchange theories, as well as early theories of distributive justice (e.g., Adams, 1965; Blau, 1964; Homans, 1961; Walster, Walster, Berscheid, & Austin, 1978). These theories assume that people approach life as a series of negotiated exchanges and that human relationships and interactions are best understood by applying subjective cost-benefit analyses and comparisons of alternatives. These theories posit that issues of equity and justice arise whenever two or more persons exchange valued resources, whether these resources consist of goods, services, money, or even love and affection. Although based on an assumption that people are rationally self-interested, these theories also propose that properly socialized persons learn that to maximize rewards in the long run, they need to understand and adhere to norms of fairness in their relationships with others (e.g., Walster et al., 1978). Groups maximize their collective gain by evolving accepted systems for fairly apportioning the costs and benefits of social cooperation among members. Therefore, these theories propose that (a) groups evolve norms about fair exchange, (b) groups generally reward members who treat others according to these norms and punish those (i.e., incur greater costs to) who do not, and (c) participating in unfair exchange causes psychological distress that in turns motivates attempts to restore fairness (Walster et al., 1978). Not surprisingly, justice theories that use economic exchange as a guiding theoretical metaphor have primarily inspired studies that examine people’s reactions to what they get out of a given encounter or relationship and how perceptions of either under- or overbenefit lead people to change either their costs or their benefits to restore a psychological sense of balance or fairness.

Considerable research has been consistent with the notion that people do tend to track relative costs and benefits, and these cost-benefit calculations influence perceptions of fairness and a host of fairness-related behavior and reactions. For example, people (a) attend to and care about how much they contribute to and get out of their social relationships (Konow, 1996; Walster et al., 1978), including what they contribute to and get out of their closest and most intimate relationships, such as dating and marriage (Rusbult, 1983; Sprecher & Schwartz, 1994); (b) take into account deservingness criteria (e.g., relative contributions) when deciding how to fairly allocate resources to others (for reviews, see Brewer & Kramer, 1985; Cook, 1975); (c) incur costs to punish someone who violates standards of fair allocation behavior (e.g., Fehr & Fischbacher, 2004; Fehr & Schmidt, 1999); and (d) perceive getting both more and less than others do for similar effort to be unfair, and they will change their levels of contribution to a relationship if they feel either under- or overbenefited (see Walster et al., 1978, for a review). In summary, a vast amount of research has been consistent with the notion that people care about the fairness of distributions of costs and benefits, and people use notions of economic exchange to understand the fairness of their social relationships.

Homo Socialis: Needs for Status, Standing, and Belonging

A shift in the metaphor that guided justice theorizing and research in social psychology occurred during the early 1980s with the introduction of the group value model of procedural fairness. The guiding metaphor of this program of research was the notion that people more often seek to satisfy relational motives, such as needs to feel valued, respected, and included in important social groups, than pursue material self-interest; that is, homo economicus yielded to homo socialis. Therefore, research began to focus more on leaders’ or authorities’ behaviors and decision making and how these affected recipients’ reasoning about fairness, and it focused less on outcome distributions and the factors that determined them (e.g., Lind & Tyler, 1988; Tyler & Lind, 1992). By using the “need to belong” as a lens for examining what mattered in the psychology of justice, researchers broadened their understanding of how and why people make fairness judgments. For example, researchers identified the pervasive influence of procedural treatment (such as variations in opportunities for voice, being treated with dignity and respect, and freedom from bias) on perceptions of fairness, working from the assumption that procedural treatment provides more relevant information for judging one’s relative standing than do material outcomes.

Considerable research has been consistent with the homo socialis prediction that procedural treatment and people’s concern with needs to feel valued and respected as group members influence perceptions of fairness and a host of fairness-related behavior and reactions. For example, people (a) spontaneously mention issues about treatment and lack of respect more than they do specific outcomes when they are asked to recall specific instances of injustice or unfairness (Lupfer, Weeks, Doan, & Houston, 2000; Mikula, Petri, & Tanzer, 1990); (b) use procedural treatment and not just decision outcomes when evaluating the fairness of authorities and institutions (Lind & Tyler, 1988; McFarlin & Sweeney, 1992); (c) become more committed to organizations when they believe they are treated well, even if they receive nonpreferred outcomes (Greenberg, 1990; Skarlicki & Folger, 1997; Tyler, 1989); and (d) identify more strongly with procedurally fair groups and authorities, which in turn relates to a host of other consequences, such as cooperating with the rules and going the extra mile to serve the groups’ interests (see Tyler & Blader, 2003, for a review). In summary, a large amount of research has been consistent with the notion that people’s fairness reasoning is shaped by more than the material or concrete outcomes they receive from a social exchange. People also care about how decisions are made and the degree to which decision makers signal that people are valued and respected members of the group. Researchers may not have discovered the importance of procedures and treatment to justice judgments had they remained solely committed to understanding justice from the perspective of only economic exchange.

Homo Moralis: Moral Authenticity and Conceptions of the Good

Now another shift seems to be underway. A number of theorists and researchers have turned their attention to the role that moral concerns play in people’s justice reasoning and behavior (e.g., Brosnan & de Waal, 2003; Cropanzano, Byrne, Bobocel, & Rupp, 2001; de Waal, 1996; Fehr & Fischbacher, 2004; Folger, 2001; Folger, Cropanzano, & Goldman, 2005; Skitka & Houston, 2001; Skitka et al., in press). Theorists across a host of different disciplinary traditions seem to be converging on the insight that managing the particular challenges of group living (e.g., aggression, competition, cooperation, deception, and the undermining role of self-interest) led to the adaptation, through natural selection, of humans to care about morality independent of their self-interest and belongingness needs. People who learned to manage the balance between competition and cooperation, develop conceptions of moral right and wrong, and punish those who broke contracts or other justice arrangements had a clear adaptive advantage over those who failed to develop traits that allowed them to manage these challenges (see Robinson, Kurzban, & Jones, 2007, for a detailed review).

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Halftitle
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Knitting Together an Elephant
• 2. Injustice and Identity
• 3. Beyond Blame and Derogation of Victims
• 4. Preserving the Belief in a Just World
• 5. From Moral Outrage to Social Protest
• 6. Deservingness, the Scope of Justice, and Actions Toward Others
• 7. The Power of the Status Quo
• 8. System Justification
• 9. Self-Regulation, Homeostasis, and Behavioral Disinhibition in Normative Judgments
• 10. The Psychology of Punishment
• 11. Legitimacy and Rule Adherence
• 12. Justice in Aboriginal Language Policy and Practices
• 13. The Antecedents, Nature, and Effectiveness of Political Apologies for Historical Injustices
• Author Index
• Subject Index