Melvin J. Lerner

The Belief in a Just World

The “belief in a just world” refers to those more or less articulated assumptions which underlie the way people orient themselves to their environment. These assumptions have a functional component which is tied to the image of a manageable and predictable world. These are central to the ability to engage in long-term goal-directed activity. In order to plan, work for, and obtain things they want, and avoid those which are frightening or painful, people must assume that there are manageable procedures which are effective in producing the desired end states (Erikson, 1950; Merton, 1957).

Deserving and the Emergence of Forms of Justice1

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses “deserving” and “emergence” of the theme of justice. The related themes of justice and deserving pervade the entire fabric of a society. The evidence for the importance of the theme of justice in a society can be strikingly juxtaposed against the equally vivid signs of institutionalized injustice and widespread indifference to the fate of innocent victims. Although various theorists have treated the definition in a conceptually more systematic way, “deserving” refers essentially to the relation between a person and his outcomes. A person deserves an outcome if he has met the appropriate “preconditions” for obtaining it. If a person does not get the outcome or gets something judged to be of less value, then he has not received all he deserved. Of course, the outcomes in question can be negative rather than positive in nature. The chapter approaches the more substantive issue of the extent to which people care about justice and the way these concerns affect their lives. It examines the question of why people care at all about justice and deserving. One possibility is suggested by a consideration of a developmental sequence, particularly the transition from living by the “pleasure” principle to living by the “reality” principle. The chapter highlights the development of the “personal contract”, altruism, and forms of justice.

Integrating societal and psychological rules of entitlement: The basic task of each social actor and fundamental problem for the social sciences

A preliminary statement of a theoretical framework integrating psychological and societal determinants of justice in human affairs is presented. It is proposed that the social structure provides the rules of entitlement and decision making that regulate the course of routine social interaction. These societally based norms are representable in peoples conscious thought processes. By contrast, the psychologically generated rules of entitlement, typically contradict conventionally accepted rules of thought and discourse and thus remain “unconscious.” The major part of the discussion considers the motivationally important circumstances that engage the unconscious psychologically compelling determinants and how their appearance in behavior is both shaped and legitimized by the situationally prevailing normative context. The final section considers some of the more important methodological, theoretical, and social policy implications of this social psychological theory of entitlements.

The Two Forms of Belief in a Just World

The discussion that follows begins with the observation that the dominant view among contemporary investigators is that most adults have outgrown the childish belief they live in a just world (BJW). These BJW investigators have also assumed that one can assess the vestigial remnants of that belief as a stable meaningful individual difference variable. Beginning with the question of why this view of BJW has prevailed over the initial theory and research that portrayed BJW as a “fundamental delusion,” I will raise and attempt to address several basic issues. Among these are whether, in fact, adults give up their BJW or merely employ various ways to maintain it in the face of contradicting evidence, and to what extent BJW actually influences people’s lives. After reviewing relevant evidence and contemporary theories, I will offer evidence to the effect that people actually maintain and express the effects of two forms of BJW: One involves consciously held conventional rules of morality and rational social judgments, while the second is characterized by preconscious processes with primitive rules of blaming and automatic emotional consequences. Recognizing the two forms of BJW raises questions concerning what can and cannot be profitably studied with questionnaire research. Clearly, the highly creative and insightful contributions reported in the chapters in this volume are among the best examples of what can be learned. Finally, I will conclude with the scientific and personal implications of failing to recognize the differential properties and influences of these two forms of BJW.

The Justice Motive in Human Relations

And so, as described in the previous chapter, the attempt to understand how people will react to conditions of scarcity leads directly to the issue of whether they experience their fate and the fates of those they care about as just or unjust. This statement is not at all simple nor obvious in its implications, as we shall see in a moment. After all, identifying the sense of justice as the key issue is equivalent to saying that in order to understand what will happen in our future, collectively and individually, we must solve one of the most enigmatic and complex problems that has preoccupied social analysts throughout the history of Western civilization: How does the theme of justice appear in people’s lives?

The heroic motive: Some experimental demonstrations

Abstract The appearance of heroic motives in interpersonal relations is examined. Three experiments were conducted to test the general hypothesis that witnessing the victimization of a partner would impel young men to incur costs in order to confront the transgressor. In each experiment, either the individual, his partner, or an anonymous other was insulted. Experiments 1 and 2 revealed that individuals were most willing to confront the insulter when their female partners (Experiment 1) or their male teammates (Experiment 2) were victimized. That pattern occurred despite evidence indicating that the most negative affective reactions were experienced by individuals who had been directly insulted. Experiment 3 revealed that individuals were also more willing to perform a subsequent altruistic act in response to the victimization of their partners than when they or an anonymous other person had been victimized. Taken together, the results indicated that heroic motivations in response to the victimization of a partner were distinguishable from other more negatively oriented processes that were aroused in response to self-victimization by the insulter.

Current societal concerns about justice

Doing Justice to the Justice Motive M.J. Lerner. Distributive Justice in a Real World R. Hardin. The Power of the Myth of Selfinterest D.T. Miller, R.K. Ratner. Empathy, Altruism, and Justice: Another Perspective on Partiality C.D. Batson. Intergenerational Relations, Inequality and Social Justice K.S. Cook, S. Donnelly. Have Feminists Abandoned Social Activism? Voices from the Academy F.J. Crosby, et al. From Is to Ought and the Kitchen Sink: On the Justice of Distributions in Close Relationships B. Reichle. Justice and Leadership: A Social Co-constructionist Agenda J.R. Meindl, K.J. Thompson. Victims without Harmdoers: Human Casualties in the Pursuit of Corporate Efficiency M.J. Lerner. Mass Unemployment under Perspective of Justice L. Montada. What Is Fair in the Environmental Debate? S. Clayton. Is Justice Finite? The Case of Environmental Inclusion S. Opotow. Are Proenvironmental Commitments Motivated by Health Concerns or by Perceived Justice? E. Kals. Tradeoffs between Justice and Selfinterest L. Montada. Index.

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.

A little time and effort...Who deserves what from whom?

What determines whether people will help someone in apparent need? If one consults the various summaries of the literature designed to shed light on this question, what becomes apparent is that the various studies of &dquo;pro-social behaviors&dquo; have been extensions of the prevailing assumptions of social-psychological theory (Bryan and London, 1970; Krebs, 1970; Macauley and Berkowitz, 1970). The danger in following such a strategy is that we miss the opportunity to allow this important social event to tell us something about social behavior in general. While &dquo;modelline or &dquo;diffusion of responsibility&dquo; or &dquo;reactance&dquo; may indeed be relevant in predicting the like lihood that someone will engage in &dquo;pro-social behavior&dquo;, in focusing our researcy efforts on these familiar processes we won’t ask the most direct, obvious and important questions -&dquo;Is it possible that people actually do care about the fate of others?&dquo;, &dquo;How important is this concern?&dquo;, &dquo;Where does it come from and how does it develop?&dquo; By allowing these latter questions to guide our research we found that people do care strongly about their own deserving and about justice for others. For example, our earliest studies and those of others have found that what has often been construed as indifference to

A new look at equity and outcomes as determinants of satisfaction in close personal relationships

This research reexamined the previously established relation between allocation of resources and satisfaction in close relationships. Using self-report data from two different samples, undergraduate students and married couples, we replicated and extended the procedure employed in past studies to assess the relative strength of equity, equality, and own outcomes as predictors of relationship satisfaction. As expected the two samples differed in the relative strength of the correlates of satisfaction. The married couples revealed different predictors of satisfaction depending upon which of two forms their relationship had taken. Those who reported being in an “identity” (communal) relationship were most satisfied when they provided high inputs to enhance their partners outcomes, whereas those in an “exchange” relation were more responsive to the outcomes they received. The dating students, whether they reported being in an identity or exchange relation, were most satisfied when their own outcomes were maximized. The results also suggested methodological limitations in the earlier studies that had compared the relative association with satisfaction of an unreliable measure of equity with minimal variance and a highly reliable measure of outcomes with considerably greater variance. The previously established strong association between the persons satisfaction and their own outcomes in a close relationship was found to be dependent upon the nature of the sample and the relative reliability of the correlates employed in the regression analyses.