Distributive Justice

Distributive justice is a major preoccupation for political and social psychology, not because it constitutes a major theory itself, but because it surfaces in virtually every politically relevant psychological theory, including social identity theory, social dominance orientation, relative deprivation theory, and system justification theory, to name a few.

Distributive justice is fundamental to all successful human relations, be they interpersonal or intergroup. The main focus for distributive justice is how resources are, and how they ought to be, distributed among individuals, among subgroups within a larger group, and among groups themselves. Resource distribution is clearly a psychological issue in the sense that there is no independent, objective, universal answer to questions of resource distribution.

Resource distribution is critically important because perceptions of an unjust distribution are associated ...