The Justice Motive in Everyday Life

by Edited by Michael Ross , Dale T. Miller

• ISBN13: 9780521087933
• ISBN10: 0521087937
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2008-12-11
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This book contains essays in honour of Melvin J. Lerner, a pioneer in the psychological study of justice. The contributors to this volume are internationally renowned scholars from psychology, business, and law. They examine the role of justice motivation in a wide variety of contexts, including workplace violence, affirmative action programs, helping or harming innocent victims and how people react to their own fate. Contributors explore fundamental issues such as whether people's interest in justice is motivated by self-interest or a genuine concern for the welfare of others, when and why people feel a need to punish transgressors, how a concern for justice emerges during the development of societies and individuals, and the relation of justice motivation to moral motivation. How an understanding of justice motivation can contribute to the amelioration of major social problems is also examined.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Introduction

Pursuing the justice motive

Theoretical Perspectives on the Justice Motive

Doing justice to the justice motive

The justice motive in perspective

Perverse justice and perverse norms: another turn of the screw

Justice motivation; moral motivation

Victim Derogation and the Belief in a Just World

Why we reject innocent victims

Helping and rationalization as alternative strategies for restoring the belief in a just world: evidence from longitudinal change analyses

Violence in the workplace: the explanatory strength of social (in)justice theories

The just world and Winston Churchill: an approach/avoidance conflict about psychological distance when harming victims

The Justice Motive and Pro-Social Behavior

Just world, social responsibility, and helping behavior

Policies to redress social injustice: is the concern for justice a cause both of support and opposition?

Justice and empathy: what motivates people to help others?

The justice motive and altruistic helping: rescuers of Jews in Nazi occupied Europe

Acting righteously: the influence of attitude, moral responsibility, and emotional involvement

Justice-based Reactions to Transgressors

Retributive justice: its social context

Just punishments: research on retributional justice

Deservingness, entitlement, and reactions to outcomes

Just world processes in demonizing

Justice and Reaction to One's Own Fate

Belief in a just world as personal resource in school

Awakening to discrimination

Deservingness and perceptions of procedural justice in citizen encounters with the police

Fairness judgments as cognitions

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