Abstract

Fairness heuristic and uncertainty management theories predict that justice will be more important in environmentally uncertain conditions, and that early justice judgments will be applied to resolve consequent ambiguity in justice information. In the literature and research on the social psychology of justice, justice judgments are construed as assessments of the presence or absence of specific criteria. However, social phenomena are complex and often characterized by clear yet ambivalent and conflicting information. For instance, the diverse behavioural or procedural elements comprising a justice event may be discretely perceived as fair or unfair. An individual making a justice judgment must resolve these separate and competing pieces of information into a monolithic justice judgment. We predicted that environmental contexts of social standing uncertainty would promote thorough and deep processing of information, consistent with a compensatory judgment process. When social standing is certain, as in the case of long standing membership within a group, we expected a non-compensatory process with a threshold effect such that at certain levels of unfairness, fair information would be disregarded. Results of a scenario study of five conditions of social standing uncertainty supported these predictions. Implications for theory, limitations of the current study and future directions are discussed.

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