Comment on Lane and Messe's confusing clarification of equity theory.

Abstract

The Lane and Messe study, which purports to have clarified key issues in equity theory, is critically reviewed. The Lane and Messe study attempts to assess the effect of internal standards of equity on the final distribution of rewards in a typical equity situation. In the present study, the issues surrounding a notion of internal standards are discussed, and Lane and Messe's hypotheses are clarified. Numerous methodological and procedural flaws render Lane and Messe's results ambiguous. While the notion of an internal standard of equity is deemed an attractive one, the Lane and Messe study sheds little light on this phenomenon. Equity theory has traditionally assumed that individuals evaluate the equitableness of a situation by comparing their relative outcomes with some other person's. Lane and Messe (1972) have taken a somewhat different view. They investigated the possibility that persons assess equity by first comparing their relative outcomes to an internal standard of fairness rather than to a comparison person. The purpose of the present article is to discuss the theoretical issues raised by Lane and Messe and to specify the methodological problems in their attempt to experimentally deal with those issues. The conclusion reached is that assessment of equity relative to an internal standard is an appealing idea, but, due to numerous methodological flaws in the Lane and Messe study, it still lacks empirical support. Before addressing the issues raised by Lane and Messe (1972), it is instructive to describe the social comparison model of equity theory originally formulated by Adams (1965). According to this model, an actor, Person, assesses the fairness of a situation by 1 During work on this article Austin was sup