1 The Study of Justice in Social
Psychology and Related Fields
E. Allan Lind
The social psychology of justice and fairness is a topic that lies at the
core of our lives as social beings. Perceptions of fairness are quintessentially
social because they address judgments of how one is treated by or
relative to other people. As will be seen in the various chapters of this
book, the social psychology of justice lies at the intersection of two
major subdisciplines of our science—social cognition and interpersonal
relations/group processes: judgments of fairness are profoundly affected
by, and also themselves have profound effects on, a variety of cognitive
and group dynamic processes.
Perhaps a good place to begin is with a few comments on terms and
distinctions used in the social psychology of justice. First, by and large
scholars in this field use the terms “justice” and “fairness” interchangeably,
and they generally use both terms to refer to subjective assessments
of fairness. Occasionally a distinction is made between “justice”
as referring to formal allocations or processes and “fairness” as referring
to informal or everyday interactions, but most often there is little
distinction made between the two words. Thus, it is not unusual to see
scholars talk of research on “justice judgments” when these judgments
are in fact assessed with survey items asking about “fairness.” As
Mikula (2005) notes, we sometimes fail to point out that we are
studying what people perceive to be fair, not what is fair in some
objective or absolute sense. We are almost always talking about perceptions
of fairness.
A distinction that is often used is that between “distributive justice”
(or “outcome justice”) and “procedural justice.” I will return to this
distinction later in the chapter, but for the moment it is sufficient to
note that people can experience fair or unfair treatment both in terms of
the outcomes they receive and in terms of the way they are treated by
formal procedures or informal social process. Distributive justice was
the first aspect of fair treatment to receive substantial attention in social
psychology (see, e.g., Adams, 1963, 1965), and the outcome fairness
issues that are at the core of distributive justice correspond more closely
with the meaning of fairness in everyday language. However, judgments
of the fairness of procedure and process, which engaged the attention of
social psychologists a bit later (see, e.g., Lind & Tyler, 1988; Thibaut
and Walker, 1975; Walker, LaTour, Lind, & Thibaut, 1974), have been
found to be just as powerful—and often more powerful—in their
psychological consequences.
Motivating versus Motivated Justice Processes
Another fundamental distinction in work on the psychology of justice
concerns the overall direction of causality between fairness beliefs and
other cognitions. Within the social psychology of justice there have been,
from the very beginning, two distinct causal patterns that have engaged
our attention. Many justice scholars have explored how various experiences
affect perceptions of fairness and how those perceptions of fairness
then cause changes in subsequent behavior or attitudes. Other scholars
have looked at how other psychological factors—especially balancerelated
desires for a “just world” or the need to protect one’s social
identity—cause the perceiver to distort fairness judgments. Consideration
of both directions of causality is seen in one of the earliest theoretical
works on the psychology of justice, Stacey Adams’ Equity Theory (Adams,
1963, 1965). Equity theory proposed that unfair outcome distributions
could cause changes in behavior, but it also suggested that changes in
attitudes could be undertaken to make the unfairness more palatable.
Equity distress from overpayment, for example, was seen as something
that could prompt people to perform better as they attempted to deserve
previously unfair positive outcomes, but the perceived inequity could also,
according to the theory, be rationalized away by adjusting assessments of
the value of one’s work upwards to make the overly positive outcomes
seem fair.
On the one hand, some of us have studied how experiences (encounters
with outcomes or processes) affect feelings of fair treatment and
how these fairness judgments in turn affect things like the acceptance of
rules or decisions (see, e.g., Lind, Kulik, Ambrose, & Park, 1993;
Thibaut and Walker, 1975; Tyler, 1990; Walker et al., 1974). Others
have looked at how fairness-related beliefs are distorted by other
cognitions (e.g., Lerner, 1980; Jost & Banaji, 1994, Jost & Kay,
2005). The first of these lines of work could be termed “motivating
justice processes”; the second could be termed “motivated justice processes.”
Both lines of work have a great deal of empirical support and
both have prompted credible theories, so there is little doubt that justice
both affects and is affected by other social psychological dynamics. As
I will mention at the end of this chapter, where I will describe my views
of what the next frontiers of justice research will be, research and
theory that integrates and reconciles these two lines of work seems to
me key to the continued advancement of our understanding of the
2 E. Allan Lind
social psychology of justice. Both lines of work are represented among
the chapters in this book, and at least three—the chapters by Jackson
and Pósch and by Brockner and Wiesenfeld, and my own chapter on the
fairness heuristic—describe work that might well contribute to that
reconciliation.
Motivating justice processes are illustrated well by what is called the
“fair process effect” (Folger, 1977). A great many studies show that
perceptions of fair treatment lead to greater trust in and perceived
legitimacy of authorities (e.g., Tyler, 1990, 1997; Tyler & Huo, 2002;
Tyler & Jackson, 2014; Tyler & Lind, 1992), more acceptance of
authorities’ decisions (e.g., Lind et al., 1993; Walker et al., 1974),
greater feelings of social identity (e.g., Tyler & Blader, 2000, 2003),
the expenditure of greater effort in support of the group, and enhanced
cooperative behavior (Moorman, 1991; Tyler & Blader, 2000, 2003).
Perceptions of unfair treatment have been found to diminish trust and
legitimacy and to produce resentment toward, exit from, and even
retaliation against the group linked to the unfair treatment (e.g., Lind,
Greenberg, Scott, & Welchans, 2000; Van den Bos, 2018).
It is arguable that this capacity to motivate changes in other attitudes
and to drive behaviors is one of the reasons that fairness research has
spread to a variety of applied disciplines. A great deal of research on the
psychology of justice has been and is being done in such areas as
organizational behavior and marketing, judicial and police studies, and
government policy studies. The interest in these areas in studying the
antecedents and consequences of fairness judgments is driven often by
findings that perceptions of fairness can have profound effects on the
functioning of these areas of social life. While it is certainly desirable in
and of itself that people feel fairly treated at their jobs, by those they
buy from, and by those who govern them, there is little doubt that the
downstream effects of fairness perceptions—the capacity of feelings of
fair treatment to make people engage more fully and cooperatively with
employers and government—provides a substantial incentive for scholars
(and managers and policy makers) to pay attention to the social
psychology of justice.
The other direction of causality—the motivated cognition effects that
can drive or bias fairness judgments and related beliefs and attitudes,
sometimes in unexpected ways—is seen in what are termed “just
world” and “system justification” effects. Adams’ (1965) suggestion
that “inequity distress” motivates perceptual distortions of inputs or
outcomes, distortions to make inequitable situations seem fairer, is an
early example of motivated fairness cognition. Lerner and his colleagues
(e.g., Lerner, 1980; Lerner & Goldberg, 1999; Lerner & Simmons,
1966) proposed that people become uncomfortable when they observe
events or situations that violate their desire to see the world as a fair
place and suggested that this discomfort can be alleviated by changing
The Study of Justice in Social Psychology 3
perceptions of deservingness. Lerner’s “just world” hypothesis explains
phenomena like “blaming the victim” for his or her misfortunes. Jost
and his colleagues (see Jost & Banaji, 1994; Jost, Banaji, & Nosek,
2004) have described and analyzed motivated justice effects in System
Justification Theory. The chapter in this volume by Engstrom, Alic, and
Laurin describes our current understanding of these justice processes.
Paradigms in the Social Psychology of Justice
There are at least three very good recent accounts of the history of
psychological study of justice-related phenomena. Colquitt, Greenberg,
and Zapata-Phelan (2005) traced the development of justice studies from
the early studies of Stouffer and his colleagues in the 1940s (Stouffer,
Suchman, DeVinney, Starr, & Williams, 1949), through second half of
the twentieth century, up to the empirical and theoretical work that took
place in the first years of the 2000s. Bobocel and Gosse (2015) provide
a history of research and theory in procedural justice and Ambrose, Wo,
and Griffith (2015) describe research and theory on overall justice judgments;
both works include more recent work than that available to
Colquitt et al. These three works together give a detailed account and
insightful analyses of the development of our field. (The fact that all three
of these chapters appear in collections on “organizational justice” should
not be a source of concern for readers; all three chapters describe the
relevant empirical and theoretical work in core social psychology as well
as in organizational psychology per se.) In the following paragraphs I will
provide, in broad strokes, a description of what seem to me to be the
major directions and conceptual developments in the study of the psychology
of fairness over the past six or seven decades.
First, let us consider the development of work on motivating justice
judgments. Colquitt et al. (2005) organize their history of justice research
into “waves,” the first of which they term the “distributive justice wave.”
I think it might be more useful here to employ the terminology of Thomas
Kuhn (1962) and to speak of two paradigms that have provided the
intellectual infrastructure of scholarship on the social psychology of
justice. The first of these paradigms, which I term the “outcome-focused
paradigm” in justice studies, was based the assumption that people are
mostly driven by their individual outcomes, an assumption underlay both
interdependence theory (Kelley & Thibaut, 1978; Thibaut & Kelley,
1959) and equity theory (Adams, 1963, 1965). In the middle of the
twentieth century theory and research in the psychological, social, and
economic sciences were for the most part founded on the assumption that
self-interest drove almost all actions and indeed most cognition. Early
research like that of Stouffer et al. (1949) on relative deprivation might in
retrospect be said to involve both outcome and process fairness, but at the
time the reactions to unfair treatment they studied were viewed as reactions
4 E. Allan Lind
to receiving outcomes that did not comport with norms of fair distribution.
The justice and equity concepts that were introduced into sociology and
psychology by scholars like Homans (1961), Adams (1963), and Blau
(1964) focused on distributive justice, on the psychology of what made
rewards and costs fair or unfair. Initially, work on the psychology of justice
saw fairness as defined by proportional payment or punishment, and
reactions to equitable or inequitable distributions in exchange relationships
were the primary target of inquiry.
An experiment by Adams and Rosenbaum (1962; Experiment 2) gives
a good feel for the origins of and support for outcome-focused work on
the social psychology of justice. In this experiment, the undergraduate
participants in all conditions were paid well to conduct interviews, but
approximately half of the participants were led to believe that this
payment was more than was equitable, while the remainder were led to
believe that the payment was equitable. (There was a second manipulation
that had to do with whether the payment was hourly or piece-rate.
I will only describe the findings for the hourly rate participants; the piecerate
participants behaved differently, though their performance differences
also supported Adams’ equity theory.) The participants who felt
that they were being unfairly overpaid worked harder and produced
more than did the control condition participants who received the same
hourly payment but who had been convinced that it was fair. Figure 1.1
shows the mean productivity scores for both groups. Adams (1963,
1965) argued that the increased performance of those who thought they
were being overpaid was the result of their effort to make their inputs
proportional to their rewards by raising the overall level of input.
0.2
0.21
0.22
0.23
0.24
0.25
0.26
0.27
0.28
Average Productivity Scores
Average ProductivityÑHourly Wage Participants
Believed Overpaid Believed Equitably Paid
From Adams and Rosenbaum, 1962, Experiment 2, hourly rate participants
Figure 1.1 Average productivity—hourly wage participants
The Study of Justice in Social Psychology 5
From the mid-1960s through the mid-1970s, the outcome-focused
paradigm was the background for most theorizing and research on the
social psychology of justice. Adams’ work on inequity distress was
a departure from “pure” exchange or interdependence theories because
it posited that people would act in ways that were not in their strict
objective self-interest—for example by working harder—in order to
avoid the uncomfortable feeling that would result from inequitable
outcomes, but the relevant psychology still focused on reactions to
immediate outcomes. During the next decade scholars elaborated the
concept of distributive justice to include other norms of allocation,
especially norms that mandated distributing outcomes equally or in
terms of need (see, e.g., Deutsch, 1975). Research and theory on justice
in this outcome-focused paradigm was so influential that in 1976
Berkowitz and Walster (1976; see also, Walster, Berscheid, and Walster,
1973; Walster, Walster, and Berscheid, 1978) entitled an edition of
Advances in Experimental Social Psychology that they edited, “Equity
Theory: Toward a General Theory of Social Interaction.”
But even as Walster, Berscheid, and Walster (1973) and Berkowitz
and Walster (1976) advanced the argument that distributive justice
could supply a unifying construct for much of social psychology,
research was underway that would shift the paradigm of justice
research. One experiment in particular, conducted in the early 1970s,
marks a turning point. This study showed the impact that non-outcome
factors have on fairness judgments and in doing so it began some lines
of research that ultimately undermined the view of fairness in the
outcome-focused paradigm. By introducing the concept of “procedural
justice,” this work and later studies would upend our understanding of
what fairness means and how fairness impacts behavior and attitudes.
Productive, indeed exciting, work on outcome distribution topics has
continued—as evidenced by the chapter in this volume by MacCoun
and Polcz, which looks at different outcome distributions and their
links to different forms of interpersonal relationships—but by the
1980s the attention of justice scholars had widened to include both
experienced outcomes and experienced social process as key issues in
fairness and to consider the implications of fairness for relationship
status as important reasons for why fairness matters. (In fact, Deutsch
(1975) anticipated the change in paradigms when he proposed that
different relational goals might be best served by different allocations
rules.)
This widening of interest in the social antecedents and consequences
of fairness judgments almost by necessity gave greater attention to what
fairness meant in terms of experienced relationships with other people,
organizations, and social institutions. For this reason, I term this new
approach to the psychology of justice the “relationship-focused paradigm.”
Work on outcome distribution fairness would devote more and
6 E. Allan Lind
more attention to the relationships within which the distribution occurs
—again the MacCoun and Polcz chapter is a good example—and
explanations of the newly-discovered procedural justice effects would
focus on what fair or unfair treatment told people about their relationship
with other individuals, organizations, institutions, and governments.
The new paradigm ultimately gave rise to theories of the
psychology of justice that blend both outcome interdependence and
social identity processes in order to explain how fairness works (e.g.,
Lind, 1995, 2001; Lind & Tyler, 1988; Tyler & Blader, 2000, 2003;
Tyler & Lind, 1992).
The experiment that began the paradigm shift deserves some consideration
here, because it illustrates how factors other than outcomes can
influence justice judgments. In 1974, Walker et al. (1974) published
a study revealing that fairness judgments were profoundly affected not
just by the outcome of a social interaction but also by the processes
experienced by those involved. The Walker et al. experiment was
undertaken not to test any point of social psychological theory but
instead to see if research methods from experimental social psychology
could productively address psychological assumptions in law (see generally
Thibaut and Walker, 1975). Laurens Walker, a law professor,
and John Thibaut, a social psychologist, along with two graduate
students working with Thibaut (including the author of this chapter)
conducted the experiment to examine the psychological underpinnings
of the legal concept of procedural justice—the idea that fairness exists
not just in the outcome of legal trials and hearings but also in the
process used to arrive at the verdict.
In the context of an elaborate business simulation, participants in
the Walker et al. study were informed that their team had been
accused of violating a rule. Their teammate (who was actually
a confederate of the experimenter) was accused by another team of
stealing ideas for a creative task on which the teams were competing.
The rules of the simulation provided for a brief trial to resolve such
accusations, with the case to be adjudicated by a law student from the
university where the study was being conducted. The trial procedure,
the participant’s knowledge about whether his or her team was guilty
of the transgression, and the outcome of the trial were all manipulated
as between-subjects factors. The procedure manipulation is of particular
interest here: it involved high or low levels of what Thibaut and
Walker (1975) termed “process control,” a procedural variable similar
to what is termed “voice” (Folger, 1977) in later justice work. In the
high process control conditions, a representative of the participant’s
team presented evidence directly to the adjudicator; in the low process
control conditions, an independent investigator was said to decide
what evidence would be presented. In fact, the content of the evidence
presentations was identical in all conditions.
The Study of Justice in Social Psychology 7
The experiment produced a remarkable finding. The trial procedure
did matter, and it mattered a great deal, both as a driver of fairness
judgments and as a determinant of satisfaction with the outcome of
the trial. Figure 1.2 shows the average fairness and satisfaction ratings
of participants in the trials. Whether the verdict was favorable or
unfavorable, the participants who had received high process control
thought the procedure was fairer than did those who received low
process control procedures. This difference carried over to reactions to
the verdict itself and to the judge: Participants who experienced high
process control rated themselves as more satisfied with the verdict and
as trusting the judge more than did those who experienced low
process control procedures.
Thibaut, Walker, and their colleagues replicated and extended the
key findings of this first procedural justice experiment (see, e.g., Lind,
Kurtz, Musante, Walker, & Thibaut, 1980; Thibaut and Walker,
1975), and others soon demonstrated procedure effects on perceived
fairness and on acceptance of outcomes in other contexts, such as work
settings (e.g., Folger, 1977). The impact of procedural and process
variations on perceptions of fairness, which is termed a “procedural
justice effect,” and the impact of differences in perceived procedural
fairness on various downstream beliefs and behaviors, termed the “fair
process effect” (Folger, Rosenfield, Grove, & Corkran, 1979), were
replicated both in the laboratory and in the field. Many of the chapters
in this book describe fair process effects of one type or another.
The relationship-focused paradigm gathered a great deal of momentum
from the work of Tom Tyler and his colleagues (e.g., Tyler, 1990;
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
Innocent verdict Guilty verdict Innocent verdict Guilty verdict
Ratings of Fairness of Procedure and Satisfaction with Verdict
High Process Control Low Process Control
Satisfaction with
Verdict
Fairness of
Procedure
From Walker, LaTour, Lind, and Thibaut, 1974, Participant role data
Figure 1.2 Ratings of fairness of procedure and satisfaction with verdict
8 E. Allan Lind
Tyler & Caine, 1981; Tyler, Rasinski, & Spodick, 1985). This research
demonstrated in real-world settings that people did indeed form coherent
and measurable impressions of procedural fairness in these contexts
and that there were substantial psychological consequences of feeling
that one had been treated fairly or unfairly. This body of research
showed that acceptance of and obedience to political authorities were
much more likely if the authority or state entity in question was thought
to have made decisions following fair procedures. The effects seen by
Tyler and his colleagues were very strong indeed, stronger in most cases
than were the procedural fairness and fair process effects seen in
laboratory studies. It was not unusual to find process and procedure
effects that were stronger than the impact of outcome or expected
outcomes, even when the outcomes involved were quite substantial.
Tyler’s work is reviewed in part in his chapter in this book.
I will provide an example of a strong fair process effect from one of
my own papers. Lind et al. (1993) report a series of field studies on the
role of outcome and process perceptions on decisions to accept arbitrated
judgments in civil lawsuits in several U.S. Federal District Courts.
The lawsuits, which involved tort and contract cases, were required to
undergo a nonbinding arbitration before the litigants could go to trial.
The program (see Lind, 1990, Lind & Shapard, 1981, for details about
the program) offered an interesting opportunity to examine procedural
justice and fair process effects in the context of real-world decisions.
Each litigant had the right to accept the arbitrator’s decision as the final
outcome of his or her lawsuit or to reject the award and demand a trial,
and this provided a behavioral measure of acceptance of the decision.
Because we surveyed the litigants about their perceptions of the process
and outcome and because we had objective data on the arbitrators’
decisions, litigants’ perceptions of the fairness of the process and their
real and relative outcomes could be correlated with their decisions to
accept or reject the arbitrators’ rulings.
Summary findings across all of the studies reported in the Lind et al.
(1993) paper are presented in Figure 1.3, which shows the results of
a path analysis of the strength of direct and indirect factors affecting
acceptance of the arbitrator’s decision. Three points are especially
noteworthy. First, the impact of judgments of the fairness of the process
on acceptance of the decision was very strong indeed, more than twice
as strong as the impact of the objective outcomes the litigant
received. Second, the impact of impressions of the process on perceived
procedural justice (i.e., the link between process impressions and procedural
justice judgments) was twice as strong as the impact of subjective
outcome judgments on the procedural justice judgments. And third, the
total effect of process impressions (via their impact on procedural
justice judgments) on decision acceptance was approximately the same
as the total effect of both objective and subjective outcomes. Clearly the
The Study of Justice in Social Psychology 9
fair process effect in these cases was very strong indeed—if litigants
thought the process was fair, they were much more likely to accept the
outcome than if they thought the process was unfair.
The shift from the outcome-focused to the relationship-focused paradigm
had a number of other effects. Given that a hitherto unsuspected
cause of variation in fairness (voice) had been demonstrated, researchers
started looking for other new antecedents of fairness judgments. Once
the idea that fairness judgments could address social behavior other
than allocating outcomes, some fascinating research was done using
open-ended questions to ask people what they found to be fair or unfair
about their behavior or experiences (e.g., Adler, Hensler, Nelson, &
Rest, 1983; Messick, Bloom, Boldizar, & Samuelson, 1985; Mikula,
1993, 2005; Mikula, Petri, & Tanzer, 1990). Mikula, Petri, and Tanzer
(1990) mapped out examples of situations that prompted felt injustice,
using examples offered by various student participant groups. Their
work, and that of Messick et al. (1985) and Alder et al. (1983), showed
that perceptions of fair or unfair treatment could indeed arise from
a variety of experiences, including not only allocations of outcomes as
seen in distributive justice research or the provision or denial of voice as
seen in the Thibaut and Walker and Folger studies, but also rulebreaking
behavior (lying and cheating), obvious bias in treatment or
decision-making, arbitrary or corrupt use of power, disloyalty in friendships,
impolite and undignified treatment, and lack of adequate explanations
or information to guide behavior.
Within social psychology (e.g., Crosby, 1976; Folger & Martin,
1986; Lind, 2001; Tyler & Blader, 2000, 2003; Van den Bos, 2003; in
Figure 1.3 Fairness judgments, outcomes, and the acceptance of arbitration
awards
10 E. Allan Lind
press; Van den Bos & Lind, 2002; Van den Bos, Lind, & Wilke, 2001;
see also Ambrose et al., 2015; Lind & Tyler, 1988, Chapter 10; Mikula,
2005), these factors have been viewed as antecedents of either procedural
justice or general fairness judgments. Organizational scholars
(e.g., Bies, 2015; Bies & Moag, 1986; Colquitt, 2001; Greenberg,
1993) have tended to label these factors as independent forms of justice,
speaking of undignified treatment and other informal violations of
norms as “interactional injustice,” and lack of information or explanations
as “informational injustice.” The difference in whether one speaks
of a justice consideration as an antecedent or a peculiar form of justice
probably reflects one’s scholarly context. Psychologists generally seek to
explain cognitions and behavior with relatively few constructs and
processes, and parsimony is valued in our field; organizational scholars
seek clear connections between organizational practices and organizational
behaviors and are often more concerned with clear empirical
connections than with the psychological dynamics that might exist
between the connections.
The discovery that fairness is affected by process as well as outcomes
also opened the door for work on how process fairness effects might be
affected by different levels of outcomes. Brockner and Wiesenfeld
(1996) began the exploration of how and when fairness × outcome
interactions might occur, a moderation effect that has generated a great
deal of subsequent research, both basic and applied. Their chapter in
this book explores the way justice studies have entered organizational
behavior scholarship and spread out to address new topics.
We may well be on the verge of another paradigm shift in the study
of motivating justice processes. Work in biology (e.g., Brosnan, 2006,
2011; Brosnan & de Waal, 2003, 2003, 2014) and social neuroscience
(e.g., Eisenberger, Lieberman, & Williams, 2003; Tabibnia, Satpute, &
Lieberman, 2008) suggest that fairness reactions are not just questions
of cognitive balancing processes (as Adams suggested) nor are they
prompted solely by human allocation or interaction norms. As can be
seen from Brosnan’s chapter in this volume, other social mammals and
birds show reactions that are very similar to human reactions to
distributive and procedural injustice. The work of Eisenberger, Lieberman,
and others points to close connections between the human brain’s
responses to fair or unfair treatment and its response to physical
pleasure and pain.
Work using traditional social psychological methods also suggests
that we might be moving into a “fundamental-justice” paradigm, with
fairness-related processes seen as a basic aspect of being a social animal.
Van den Bos’ work on uncertainty management and disinhibition
effects on fairness judgments (e.g., Van den Bos, 2001; 2010; Van den
Bos & Lind, 2002; see also Hulst, Van den Bos, Akkermans, & Lind,
2017), in particular, demonstrates the connection between justice
The Study of Justice in Social Psychology 11
processes and basic psychological dynamics such as the human alarm
system (e.g., Murray, 2005; Murray, Holmes, MacDonald, & Ellsworth,
1998) and the behavioral inhibition system (e.g., Carver &
White, 1994). As I note in my chapter later in this volume, we may
well have been too cognitive in our theorizing about the psychology of
fairness. Reactions to injustice appear to be far more visceral than we
have thought.
Turning to research and theory on motivated justice cognitions, there has
also arguably been a paradigm shift in that part of social justice studies.
Much of the research on motivated justice processes during the twentieth
century, with the exception of Adams’ (1963, 1965) equity theory work,
focused on person perception in one form or another. Lerner’s Belief in
a Just World theory (Lerner, 1980; Lerner & Goldberg, 1999; Lerner &
Simmons, 1966) and the research that it prompted focused on issues like
blame and reactions to victims of crime or poverty. One might term this the
“person-perception paradigm” in motivated justice research.
Later Jost and his colleagues (e.g., Jost et al., 2004; Kay, Jimenez, &
Jost, 2002) pointed out that motivated justice processes might exist in
beliefs about social systems, introducing System Justification Theory.
System Justification Theory applied the idea of motivated cognition not
just to person perceptions but also to perceptions of qualities, including
justice-related qualities, of systems such as governments and organizations
(see the chapter by Engstrom et al. in this volume; see also, Kay
et al., 2009). Work on motivated justice processes might now be said to
be in a new “system-perception paradigm.”
Applications of the Social Psychology of Justice
The application of social psychological work on justice and fairness to
real-world problems has been remarkable from the very outset of research
in our area. Stouffer et al. conducted their research to understand not
abstract issues but the specific psychology of reactions among American
soldiers in the 1940s. Adams developed his ideas about inequity distress in
the context his work at General Electric, asking how psychology might
inform the ways organizations pay and motivate workers. Thibaut and
Walker began the study of procedural justice with a study of reactions to
judicial procedures and the legal concepts that drive them. Lerner’s work
often addressed questions of judicial and policy blaming, and Jost’s work
has quite frequently looked at policy and political beliefs. It would be
difficult to identify another area of social psychology where basic science
and application are so intertwined.
In disciplinary terms, to date the most numerous applications of the
social psychology of justice and fairness are in organizational psychology,
political psychology, and psychology and law. There are other
relatively new applications to professional relationships—for example,
12 E. Allan Lind
the chapter in this volume by Pérez-Arechaederra describes how fairness
judgments are affected by experiences with doctors and other healthcare
providers and how these judgments in turn affect important attitudes
and behaviors.
The chapters in this volume on organizational justice (those by Brockner
and Wiesenfeld and by Cropanzano, Ambrose, and Van Wagoner)
give a good overview of the very substantial literature on fairness and
fairness-related effects in the workplace. It may well be the case that
there are more studies on organizational justice than on any other justice
context. The interplay of basic social psychological research and research
on organizational justice has benefited both types of work and has
improved theory on the psychology of fairness. One example among
many is seen in the way organizational researchers picked up on the
concept of procedural justice and the way their research in organizations
in turn informed the development of justice theories within social psychology.
Early work on the effects of procedural justice in organizations,
including the finding that fairness judgments appeared to affect such
things as trust in management and harmony in the workplace (Alexander
& Ruderman, 1987) as well as organizational citizenship behavior
(Moorman, 1991; Organ, 1990; Organ & Moorman, 1993) served as
inputs to the development of relationship-centered theories (Lind &
Tyler, 1988; Tyler & Lind, 1992) of fairness.
The application of psychology of justice concepts in the judicial and
political realms is also remarkable. The example above of procedural
fairness effects on decisions to accept nonbinding arbitration decisions
is only one of many examples of applications of fairness research to
issues in law. The chapter in this volume by Jackson and Pósch is the
latest in a long line of work, dating back to Tyler’s early studies of
reactions to the perceived fairness of law-making processes (Tyler,
1988, 1990; Tyler & Caine, 1981; Tyler, Rasinski, & Griffin, 1986)
through recent work showing that fairness-enhancing procedures and
policies improve citizen perceptions of the legitimacy of governments
(Jackson, 2018; Lind and Arndt, 2016; Tyler & Huo, 2002). Tyler’s
chapter here addresses the application of fairness-enhancing measures
to the problems of enhancing legitimacy and trust and increasing
cooperation with the police, clearly a critical area for the development
of new policies and practices (Tyler, Goff, & MacCoun, 2015).
Among the newest application of the psychology of justice is that seen
in Van den Bos’ work on radicalization and the development of extremist
behavior (Van den Bos, 2018, in press), described in his chapter in this
book. This work makes clear that feelings of unfair treatment can have
profound effects on the lives of individuals and on the fabric of the state.
It would be hard to find an application of social psychological knowledge
that is more relevant to the state of the world today.
The Study of Justice in Social Psychology 13
The Next Frontiers
Writing an introduction for a volume in a series entitled Frontiers of
Social Psychology invites one to offer some thoughts not only about
where we are on the frontier of our knowledge of the topic but also to
think about what the next frontier might be. Where might we hope to
be in our understanding of the psychology of fairness and justice in five,
ten, or 20 years? What are the most intriguing unresolved issues in our
science?
I will not pretend to be able to answer these questions in any
definitive fashion, but there do seem to me to be two emerging issues
or challenges that our field will face. I suspect that each has the capacity
to create changes as important as the paradigm shifts described above.
I have hinted at both challenges in the text above, but both deserve
some more discussion.
The first of these “next frontier” issues has to do with the challenging
of integrating and expanding what has previously been a very cognitive
analysis of the psychology of justice as we seek to include the biological
and social neuroscience findings on justice and fairness. Without
a doubt we humans rely a great deal on our learned understandings
and on cultural norms and abstract symbols when we process fairnessrelevant
information. But it is equally clear from work in biology and
neuroscience that we have some “hard-wiring,” shared with other social
animals, that drives justice- and fairness-related behavior. The traditional
model of human fairness reactions as being rather malleable in
terms of which stimuli provoke feelings of fair or unfair treatment, and
the belief that fairness reactions are quite susceptible to cognitive
balancing processes is difficult to reconcile with findings of similar
response patterns in other species. While the work of Eisenberger,
Lieberman, and others show quite clear activation of parts of the brain
associated with damping down resentment and explaining away apparent
unfairness, the impression one receives is that these cognitive
processes are intervening to control a more fundamental reaction to
unfairness or inclusion, not driving the initial brain reaction. Both of
these literatures are outside my area of expertise; indeed, I suspect they
are outside the areas of expertise of many social psychologists who
study justice. But then, it is arguable that the substantial literature on
the social psychology of justice is outside the area of expertise of many
biologists and neuroscientists who do research on fairness and inclusion
processes. Justice has come to be a topic that lies not just deep inside
psychology, but one that clearly has roots in biology—I suspect that this
frontier will be most profitably explored by teams of scholars with
training in, and perspectives from, more than one discipline.
The second “next frontier” is the potential for integrating the two
lines of scholarship—motivating and motivated justice processes—that
14 E. Allan Lind
are described above. Each line of scholarship has a great deal of
research support and theoretical development. There is no doubt that
people do in fact respond to some experiences by labeling them unfair
and by reacting very strongly indeed. In fact, as Van den Bos (2018)
has documented, sometimes perceptions of unfair treatment drive
people not only to leave a social system but even to oppose it in
word and deed. That said, it is also clear from work such as that
described in the Engstrom et al. chapter in this volume that sometimes
people distort their judgments to try to make their world or their
system seem fair, even when there is substantial objective evidence to
the contrary. Each of these lines of work is undeniably valid, yet both
cannot be always valid. We have empirical findings and theoretical
analyses that identify situations where motivating fairness effects will
be relatively stronger and weaker (e.g., Brockner & Wiesenfeld, 1996;
Hulst et al., 2017; Van den Bos, 2001), and research on System
Justification Theory (e.g., Jost & Banaji, 1994; Kay et al., 2009) has
examined factors that increase or decrease the distortion of justice-related
cognitions. But there is no real match in these moderating effects—there
is no pattern that would allow us to conclude that justice judgments are
motivating in these situations but become motivated cognitions in those
other situations. If we could find the mechanisms that switch from one
modality of the psychology of justice to the other, we would have an
integrated theory of the psychology of social justice. That would certainly
be an accomplishment!
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