On Justice Knowledge Activation: Evidence for Spontaneous Activation of Social Justice Inferences

Abstract

This article focuses on how people infer the justness of events they encounter. Earlier justice research typically asked participants explicitly for their justice judgments. More recent research provided evidence for the possibility of spontaneous judgment inferences. The present research extends this study in three important ways: it provides strong evidence that (1) spontaneous social justice inferences can occur in multiple research paradigms, (2) these inferences constitute a process separate from spontaneous general evaluation of valence, and (3) spontaneous justice inferences covary with individual differences in sensitivity to justice. We provide evidence for these three conclusions by means of important implicit measurement research paradigms that we specifically tailored to study justice inferences: the probe recognition paradigm and the grid-relearning paradigm. We discuss the implications of our findings for both the literatures on justice and spontaneous inferences.