Abstract
Justice research has evolved by elucidating the factors that affect justice evaluations, as well as their consequences. Unfortunately, few researchers have paid attention to the pattern of rewards over time as a predictor of justice evaluations. There are two main objectives of this research. First, it aims to test the effect of reward stability on justice evaluations. Based on justice theory and prospect theory, we assume that an under-reward at one time cannot be fully offset by an equivalent over-reward at another time. Therefore, in unstable reward systems the asymmetry of the effect of unjust rewards with opposite directions will produce a lower level of justice evaluations over time. The second objective of this research is to show the moderating effect of the presentation order (primacy vs. recency) of unstable rewards on justice evaluations. The results from a controlled experiment with five conditions, which presents the instability of rewards in different orders, confirm both the negative effect of unstable rewards and the stronger effect of primacy on justice evaluations.
Highlights
Justice theories postulate that individuals produce justice evaluations regarding their own or others’ rewards by comparing between actual and expected rewards [1, 2]
Investigating justice processes in a repeated reward framework more accurately reflects the world. When it comes to justice processes, researchers have found that justice evaluations are open to biases from a variety of factors (Berger, Ridgeway, and Zelitch 2002, Hegtvedt and Johnson 2009, Morris and Leung 2000)
The results from the experiment show that unstable rewards are associated with lower justice evaluations, and that the presentation order of unstable rewards matters; the primacy effect is more prominent than the recency effect (e.g. [28])
Summary
Justice theories postulate that individuals produce justice evaluations regarding their own or others’ rewards by comparing between actual and expected rewards [1, 2]. If individuals’ actual rewards are incongruent with expected rewards, the rewards would be evaluated as unjust. Empirical research shows that as the incongruence between expected rewards and actual rewards becomes severe, justice evaluations proportionally decrease [1, 5]. In many situations people make repeated justice evaluations of outcomes from the same source, making justice evaluations interdependent [11, 12]. Repeated justice evaluations are the rule rather than the exception, as wages from employment are among the most commonly researched “rewards.” considering justice evaluations through time leads us to a more profound understanding of the justice process [13]. Researchers have demonstrated the PLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0168956 December 22, 2016
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