Culture and the Sense of Justice

Abstract

This article examines the intersection of culture and the sense of justice, summarizing a cumulative framework for analyzing human justice judgments that has emerged from several decades of social science research. It outlines a comprehensive guide to the terms and factors where culture may manifest itself and proposes a protocol for discerning the operation of culture. Methodological issues related to the conceptualization and operationalization of justice processes are addressed throughout. The first section develops a framework for justice analysis, distinguishing between ingredients thought to be universal and ingredients in which culture may operate. The second section discusses deductive theories in justice analysis and provides an illustration, in which one of the theories yields implications for individualism and collectivism, thus showing how justice processes can generate phenomena that come to be viewed as culturally based. The concluding section briefly discusses agendas and research designs for empirical analysis of justice and culture.