Diversity and Social Justice

LECTURE 9

What is Justice?

• Socrates asked that question at the beginning of Plato’s “Republic” and we have been asking ever since. It was, perhaps, the first great philosophical question.

What is Justice?

• In the dialogues Plato uses the dialectic method – the investigation of concepts by question and answer –, which had been the characteristic approach of Socrates.

• Like Socrates, Plato is interested not so much in asserting a definite position as in the virtues of a clear and reasonable inquiry.

What is Justice?

• The purpose of “The Republic” is to discuss the question, what is justice?

• The Greek word for justice includes much more than our concept of legal or political equality.

• It also means righteousness, in the sense of the exercise of virtue rather than mere abstinence from vice.

What is Justice?

• Plato’s search for justice is the search for the good life, for some principle or mode of conduct by which both people and States can use their best nature to the fullest.

• Socrates and his companions arrive at a definition in Plato’s book IV of the dialogue.

• Justice, they find, is a balance or harmony.

What is Justice?

• The topic of justice has only recently engaged the interest of psychologists.

• The 4th edition of the Handbook of Social Psychology (Glibert et al 1998) now devotes a chapter to justice.

What is Justice?

• Research shows that judgments on what is “just” lie at the heart of people’s feelings, cognitions, and behaviors in interactions with others (Mikula, 1998).

Justice Researchers

• Early justice researcher’s focused mostly on “distributive justice.”

• They focused on people’s relative preference for three different principles of resource distribution: need, equity, and equality.

Justice Researchers

• The two most common means of assessing this preference were by looking at the rules people followed when allocating resources to others.

• And by examining people’s reactions to the resources they received from others.

Justice Researchers

• Distributive research as a topic became less popular.

• The most popular topic over the past 2 decades has been “procedural justice.”

Justice Researchers

• Procedural justice is concerned with the fairness of the methods and processes used to determine outcomes as opposed to the fairness of the outcomes themselves.

Justice Researchers

• The shift in focus from distributive to procedural justice and from formal to informal aspects of procedural justice reflected a basic change in the way justice researchers perceived and experimentally assessed justice.

Justice Researchers

• Procedural justice researchers joined a growing chorus of social scientists who expressed dissatisfaction with the rational-actor model.

Justice Researchers

• People care about procedural justice, it was now asserted, not as means to an end (better outcomes) but as an end in itself.

Justice Researchers

• According to this view, people care whether their treatment (and not simply their outcomes) is fair because fair treatment means something crucial to them – their status within their social group.

Justice Researchers

• The shift in research from distributive to procedural justice signified a more general shift in justice research from a concern with abstract rules of resource distribution to a concern with interpersonal rules of conduct.

Justice Researchers

• This change was similar to the attention that philosophers were giving to humanitarian standards of justice.

Justice Researchers

• An example of this is the claim by Rawls (1971) that one of the entitlements that individuals are due by virtue of their humanity is the right to be treated in a way that fosters positive self-regard.

Researching Injustice in Everyday life

• Mikula (1986) collected information on unjust events people actually confront in their daily lives.

• Subjects were students in various psychology classes at the University of Graz, Austria.

Researching Injustice

• Participants were asked to take part in a research program on experiences of injustice by reporting an unjust event they had actually confronted as victims.

Researching Injustice

• Specifically subjects were instructed to describe how and when the event occurred, what actually, happened, and what exactly they felt to be unjust.

Findings

The three events most frequently mentioned by students were:

• (1) unjustified accusation and blaming, • (2) unfair grading or lack of recognition

of performance or effort, and • (3) violations of promises and

agreements.

Findings

• Notice that the findings show that the events that were reported to have elicited the experiences of injustices related to a concern with interpersonal rules of conduct.

Findings

• Violations of interpersonal codes of conduct are also a common source of feelings of injustice in organizations as well.

Findings

Instances of injustices reported by employees include the following:

• Violation of codes of conduct, • Betrayal by coworkers, and • Humiliation and wrongful accusation by

superiors.

Findings

• Procedural justice research has contributed to our knowledge of the types of actions that people perceive as wrong and provoke feelings of injustice in informal and formal relationships.

Findings

• To ask people what acts they consider unjust is in a sense to ask them what they consider people to be entitled to from others.

Findings

• The findings show that people believe they are entitled to have their say and to be listened to in their dealings with others.

Findings from Interactional Research

• Findings show that people believe they are entitled to interpersonal sensitivity.

• Put differently, people believe they are entitled to polite and respectful treatment from others (Greenberg, 1994).

Findings from Interactional Research

• Also, people think they are entitled to explanations and accounts for any actions that have personal consequences for them (Shapiro, et al. 1994).

Findings from Interactional Research

• The violation of these interactional entitlements, like any contract, is an injustice in people’s eyes.

• Disrespectful treatment can aggravate an injustice created by an underserved outcome, and is an injustice of its own.

The Experience of Injustice

• To understand how disrespectful treatment creates feelings of injustice, it is useful to look at the actual experiences of people.

The Experience of Injustice

• Studies have shown that when people suffer an injustice the most common emotional responses are anger, rage, and indignation.

• They report feeling upset, aroused, butterflies in the stomach, and increased heartbeat (Mikula, 1998).

The Link Between Disrespect and Anger

• The perception that one has been treated disrespectfully is well known to be a source of anger.

• Lazarus (1991), for example states that insult is the main factor in the arousal of anger.

The Link Between Disrespect and

Injustice• Research shows that when asked to

describe unjust events, people describe circumstances when they felt insulted or were treated disrespectfully (Mikula, 1986).

• Why do they consider an insult or a disrespectful act unjust?

The Link Between Disrespect and Injustice

• An insult or any disrespectful act is experienced as unjust because it derives people of something that they believe is rightfully theirs.

The Link Between Disrespect and

Injustice• When people are denied respect that they

believe they deserve, people feel as unjustly treated as when they are denied the material resources that they believe they deserve.

The Link Between Disrespect and Injustice

• An act of disrespect is unjust because it deprives people of something to which they are entitled.

• And it subjects people to something they do not deserve.

The Link Between Disrespect and

Injustice• Insults and disrespect produce feelings of

injustice because they create a social imbalance.

The Link Between Disrespect and Injustice

• One reason we so deeply resent insults and disrespectful acts is not simply that they hurt us in some concrete way.

• It is because such injustices are also symbolic communications.

The Link Between Disrespect and Injustice

• They are ways a wrongdoer has of saying to us, “I count but you do not,” or “I am here up high and you are done below.”

The Link Between Disrespect and

Injustice• Most of us tend to care about what others

think about us – how much they think we matter.

• Our perception of injustice is social in at least this sense.

The Link Between Disrespect and

Injustice• So when others treat us disrespectfully it

impacts us in profound and deeply threatening ways.

• We resent (or worse) those who attack us.

The Link Between Disrespect and

Injustice• Revenge and retaliation, seen as

necessary to keep one’s respect and honor, is a form of self-defense.

The Link Between Anger and Injustice

• Research shows that injustice makes people angry.

• Strong feelings of injustice make people feel justified in taking aggressive action.

The Link Between Anger and Injustice

• Some researchers contend that perceiving inequality between their group and another is a necessary condition for people to initiate collective violence.

The Link Between Anger and Injustice

• Injustices have a transcendent quality. • A personal insult that is termed an

injustice becomes a collective injustice.• And avenging the injustice becomes a

defense of the honor and integrity of the entire moral community.

The Link Between Group Values and Injustice

• Anger is not limited to injustice perpetrated against one’s self.

• Witnessing the harming of a third party can also provoke feelings of anger and injustice.

The Link Between Group Values and

Injustice• People are loyal to the “ought forces” of their

moral community, as Heider (1958) termed them.

• Violating these forces is an insult to the honor of the community and provokes moralistic anger and the urge to punish the wrongdoer.

Reactions to Injustice

• People who feel they have been treated unjustly –and who still resent the wrongdoer – chose one of two coping strategies, recent research suggests (Miller, 2001).

• They choose either to withdraw or to even the score.

Reactions to Injustice

• The reaction of the perpetrator to his or her act also affects the victim’s response.

• When the perpetrator’s response includes a sincere apology and an offer to engage in some form of restitution, this action is likely to diminish the victim’s anger.

Reactions to Injustice

• As Heider (1958) notes, the expression of remorse takes the sting out of an offense because it affirms the status of the victims and acknowledges that he or she has been treated unjustly.

Conclusions

• The pursuit of justice is a fundamental aspect of social life.

• Concern for justice and respect for personhood are powerfully and inseparably linked.

Conclusions

• By discovering what people believe to be the entitlements and responsibilities of the moral community, we glimpse what it means to be a member of that community.

Conclusions

• By discovering how conceptions of justice vary across cultures, we discover how conceptions of justice are central to understanding both individual psychology and social life.