Justice

Belief in a Just World

People almost always work with assumptions of justice, even when they do not explicitly articulate justice principles in a particular context. The social psychologist Melvin Lerner (1980) proposes that people experience a “justice motive,” which he describes as a need or desire for justice, the concern with “deserving” and justice, and the distress associated with inequity or injustice.

Lerner argues that people believe that the world is fair or just and apply this belief to their perceptions of interactions and situations. People have this “belief in a just world” (BJW) in order to satisfy their need for orderliness and controllability.

Perceiving acts of injustice or victims of injustice violates people's sense that the world is a fair place. People will condemn victims as a defensive maneuver to protect their belief in justice. Victims are perceived as being unattractive, deserving of suffering, conforming to authority, and controlling the situation. Lerner's research has shown that even martyrs, typically held in high esteem by society, are derogated. Presumably this derogation occurs because the suffering of an innocent or nobly motivated victim would threaten one's belief in a just world.

How do people know that the derogation of victims is an indication of a need to preserve the illusion of justice and not just an indication of general misanthropy? The answer is that derogation has been [Page 785]observed in research studies only when participants have no way to compensate an innocent victim. If participants are given an opportunity to help compensate a victim, they generally take the opportunity and do not derogate the victim.

Further evidence supporting Lerner's assertion that people have a need to believe in a just world has recently been produced by Canadian researcher, Carolyn Hafer. Hafer has demonstrated that participants who hear a news story about an unpunished crime are more emotionally upset than participants who hear a news story about a crime situation in which the criminal is caught and punished. Unpunished crimes violate people's sense of justice, and when people's sense of justice is violated, they experience distress.

Whereas social psychologists such as Lerner have examined the justice motive, others have considered how people arrive at judgments of justice or injustice. On what basis do people perceive injustice? Social psychologists have considered three types of principles that may be used to make judgments of fairness. These principles are distributive justice (which addresses outcomes), procedural justice (which addresses process or procedure), and retributive justice (which addresses punishing perpetrators for their wrongdoing).

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