Adding the "in" to justice: a qualitative and quantitative investigation of the differential effects of justice rule adherence and violation.

Abstract

Although justice scholars often assume that individuals react to injustice in a manner that is distinct from their reactions to justice, few studies have examined this assumption. Indeed, the most widely utilized measures in the literature assess only the adherence to rules of justice--not their violation. We conducted 2 studies to build and test theory about differential reactions to justice and injustice. An inductive study revealed that reactions to the adherence to justice rules reflected different constructs than reactions to the violations of justice rules. In a follow-up field study, we derived hypotheses for those patterns by drawing on the negativity bias and regulatory focus literatures. Specifically, justice rule violation was predicted to be more relevant to prevention-laden outcomes that represent a high level of vigilance and concerns about safety. Justice rule adherence was predicted to be more relevant to promotion-laden outcomes that represent concerns about becoming the ideal self. The field study supported many of those predictions while showing that a full-range justice measure (i.e., one that sampled both justice rule adherence and justice rule violation) explained more variance in outcomes than existing "truncated" justice measures.