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Folk conceptions of fairness and unfairness
Author(s) -
Lupfer Michael B.,
Weeks Kelly P.,
Doan Kelly A.,
Houston David A.
Publication year - 2000
Publication title -
european journal of social psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.609
H-Index - 111
eISSN - 1099-0992
pISSN - 0046-2772
DOI - 10.1002/(sici)1099-0992(200005/06)30:3<405::aid-ejsp997>3.0.co;2-u
Subject(s) - psychology , perspective (graphical) , social psychology , distributive justice , interpersonal communication , procedural justice , distributive property , economic justice , perception , economics , neoclassical economics , mathematics , artificial intelligence , neuroscience , computer science , pure mathematics
This study sought to identify the standards people invoke when judging the fairness or unfairness of outcomes of everyday events, and to determine whether their standards of judgment vary according to the fairness of the outcome and to their perspective, i.e. whether the outcomes are ones they personally experienced or witnessed. The standards of fairness laypeople were found to invoke, even when unprompted, coincided with the standards social scientists have emphasized (e.g. distributive, procedural) in their theories of psychological justice. However, laypeople emphasized these standards differently when accounting for the fairness–unfairness of personal experiences versus those they had witnessed, and when accounting for fair versus unfair outcomes. As predicted, they were more likely to invoke procedural and interpersonal criteria when judging the fairness–unfairness of their own outcomes, but more likely to invoke distributive criteria when judging others' outcomes. Regardless of perspective, laypeople cited procedural criteria as the major determinants of their fairness judgements; but cited procedural, distributive and interpersonal criteria as comparably influential in determining their unfairness judgments. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.