Gerold Mikula

The Role of Injustice in the Elicitation of Differential Emotional Reactions

Data from a large-scale study on emotional experiences in 37 countries are used to examine correlates of emotion-antecedent events being judged as unfair or unjust. This study included 2,921 students who reported situations in which they had experienced joy, anger; fear, sadness, disgust, shame, and guilt and described their situation appraisals and reactions. Anger-producing events were most frequently perceived as very unfair followed by disgust, sadness, fear, guilt, and shame. The results showed strong main effects of the perception of injustice for all negative emotions. Events experienced as unjust were described as more immoral, more obstructive to plans and goals, and having more negative effects on personal relationships. In addition, events regarded as unjust elicited feelings that were longer in duration and more intense. It is concluded that perceived injustice plays a powerful role in the elicitation of many different negative emotions and may serve as a mediating variable in emotion-antecedent appraisal.

The Experience of Injustice

“The more to a man’s disadvantage the rule of distributive justice fails of realization, the more likely he is to display the emotional behavior we call anger” (Homans, 1961, p. 75). This proposition of Homans (1961), his related analyses, and Adams’ (1965) seminal work on inequity were the main stimuli for the development of a new area of social psychological inquiry dealing with justice and injustice. Considerable progress has been made in this field, as documented in several recent books (e.g., Folger, 1984; Greenberg & Cohen, 1982; Lerner & Lerner, 1981; Mikula, 1980). However, as Deutsch (1983) has correctly pointed out recently, “there is practically no research relating to the phenomenology of injustice, to the actual experiences of people who inflict injustice or to those who suffer injustice” (p. 312). There is very little evidence on the quality of emotions that follow perception of an injustice (see Greenberg’s 1984 review of what evidence there is); the same holds for the cognitive processes elicited by the perception of an injustice. Several authors (e.g., Cohen, 1982; Kayser & Schwinger, 1982; Mikula, 1984; Utne & Kidd, 1980) have suggested that attributional thoughts will be elicited and mediate the reactions to a perceived unjust event. Empirical data are lacking here too, however.

Division of Household Labor and Perceived Justice: A Growing Field of Research

The research on the perception of fairness and justice of the division of household labor is reviewed. The first part briefly summarizes the main findings about the division of housework, and the main explanations that account for the imbalance between women and men. The following review of studies on the perception of justice of the division of housework is subdivided in two parts. The first subsection deals with studies that considered justice evaluations as the dependent variable and explored factors that contribute to the perception of injustice. The second subsection focuses on studies that considered perception of fairness as the independent variable and explored associations between perceptions of injustice and other consequences of the division of housework. The third part comments critically on the available research and suggests potentially fruitful lines and questions of future research.

Perspective-Related Differences in Interpretations of Injustice by Victims and Victimizers

Discrepancies in views about what is to be regarded as just and unjust are among the core problems of injustice. Judgments of injustice presuppose observations that people’s entitlements have been violated, that is, that they do not get what they are due by virtue of who they are and what they have done (cf. Buchanan & Mathieu, 1986; Cohen, 1986; Lerner, 1977, 1991). In addition to this most basic element, attributions of responsibility for the violation of entitlement to some other agent than the person affected, and lack of justification for the violation, have been proposed as important components of judgments of injustice (e.g., Cohen, 1982; Crosby & Gonzales-Intal, 1984; Folger, 1986; Mikula, 1993; Mikula & Petri, 1987; Montada, 1991; Utne & Kidd, 1980). If one considers the subjective nature of these various elements, disagreements over the existence of injustice seem likely. They can follow from different views about the nature of the entitlements of certain people, whether and to what extent any existing entitlements have been violated, the responsibilities of various agents, the availability of sufficient justifications, and any combination of these possibilities.

From Unfulfilled Wants to the Experience of Injustice: Women's Sense of Injustice Regarding the Lopsided Division of Household Labor

The present research deals with factors that contribute to womens sense of injustice regarding the lopsided division of household labor. The proposed model of perceived injustice combines elements of the distributive justice framework of Major (1993) and Thompson (1991), the two-factor model of relative deprivation (Crosby, 1982), and the attribution-of-blame model of judgments of injustice (Mikula, 1993). The results of a study with 132 employed women are consistent with the proposed model and show that unfulfilled wants, perceived violations of entitlement, and attributions of blame directly affect womens perceptions of being unjustly treated by their partners. Beyond that, womens judgments of injustice were indirectly affected by the outcomes of various comparison processes through their impact on perceived violations of entitlement. Finally, attributions of responsibility and perceived lack of justifications contributed indirectly to the experience of injustice through their impact on the amount of blame attributed to the partner. The findings provide evidence for the usefulness of the theories considered in this study to understand and predict womens sense of injustice, and their integration into a single model of perceived injustice.

Does it only depend on the point of view ? Perspective-related differences in justice evaluations of negative incidents in personal relationships

A series of four studies investigated systematic differences between actor and recipient interpretations and justice evaluations of negative incidents in interpersonal relationships. Due to a refined methodology, each negative incident was assessed both by the respective recipient and actor, and each participant reported incidents from both perspectives. The studies provided clear evidence of systematic recipient-actor differences and showed that the quality of the relationship between the parties involved in the incidents can moderate the occurrence and shape of the differences. Significant gender differences were found showing that women respond more accusingly than men in the role of the recipient and more defensively than men in the role of the actor. Copyright

Entitlement and the Affectional Bond

How does the sense of entitlement influence what happens in close relationships? Posing this question produced a rather remarkable variety of contributions to this volume. These include studies of gender differences in children’s household duties in Scotland, the incredibly intense mother-child “skinship” relationship in Japan, American husbands and wives sharing, or rather failing to share, household duties, the determinants of married couples’ satisfaction in the Netherlands, Austrian couples’ disagreement over how unjustly they have treated one another, and the emotional factors involved in German parents adjusting to the birth of their first child. This variation in topics and nationalities is accompanied by comparable diversity in theoretical models and analytic assumptions, for example, cognitive-affective appraisal, interdependence theory, communal versus exchange orientations, and justice motive.

What Contributes to the (Im)Balanced Division of Family Work Between the Sexes

This study examines a comprehensive set of variables that have been proposed as explaining the imbalance of the division of family work between the sexes. The analyses use survey data of 735 dual-earner couples from Austria, the Netherlands, and Portugal. The results support theoretical explanations referring to time availability, gender ideology, relative resources, and the importance of characteristics of the family system. No support was obtained for the doing-gender perspective. Additional findings suggest that increased consideration of psychological concepts adds to the understanding of why women do more family work than men. The analyses revealed similarities, but also differences between the factors that contribute to the division of household labor and childcare.

Justice : Social Psychological Perspectives

This article discusses the concept of justice from a social psychological perspective. The authors begin by briefly outlining some theoretical precursors of current social psychological research on justice. Another part is devoted to an overview of theories and empirical research in the areas of distributive and procedural justice. The article furthermore addresses interactional justice, why people care about justice, and reactions to injustice in the context of which individual differences in conceptions of justice are briefly discussed. The article ends by discussing some current trends, social applications, and some future challenges in social psychological inquiries of social justice.

Social Comparisons and Evaluations of Justice Looking for Evidence of Causal Associations

This research investigates the causal directions of associations between justice evaluations and social comparisons, distinguish- ing between the outcome and the frequency of making comparisons. Structural equation modeling analyses examine cross-sectional and longitudinal associations between womens justice evaluations of the division of family work and the outcomes and frequencies of comparing their own shares and their partners shares of work (N = 389). Results support the existence of causal effects of (1) perceived justice on the frequency and outcome of comparisons and (2) of the frequency of comparisons on perceived justice. No support was obtained for causal effects of comparison outcome on perceived justice. The latter result is attributed to the long time interval of 3 years between the two surveys.