Emotional And Behavioral Reactions To Justice/Injustice Events

Perceived justice strongly influenced people’s behaviors, attitudes, and feelings in organizations, friendships and other daily life situations. Specifically, it has been shown that experiencing fair outcome allocations or justice treatment during the allocation of outcomes leads people to experience more positive emotional feelings and that experiencing unfair outcome allocations or unfair procedures leads people to feel more sad and angry about the events happened to them. And these conclusions can be supported by a series of previous researches. Despite the attention fairness reactions receive in the literature, there is still relatively little known about what psychological processes exactly drive people’s reactions to justice judgments.In the present article, we seek to explore the role of processing style in people’s reactions to justice/injustice. The study is based on the cognitive-experiential self-theory, one of dual processing theories, which specified two information processing styles, and through which justice/injustice reactions can occur:experiential and rational. Whereas experiential processing occurs relatively subconsciously and effortlessly, rational processes entail deliberate thinking and weighing of the evidence. And experiential processing often involves the use of emotion and other heuristics as information, whereas rational processing involves more evidence-based and logic decisions. Consequently, we speculate that when people get in different situations they maybe have different reactions to an injustice depending on whether they view the transgression through an experiential or a rational processing frame.In order to test our predictions the present research is composed of following three specific studies:Study 1, using scenario method and a 2 (processing style:experiential vs. rational) ×2 (outcome:fair vs. unfair) between-group experiment was conducted. Results from a sample of 180 college students showed that outcome had a main significant effect on positive and negative emotion, that processing style had a non-significant effect on positive emotion, whereas had a significant effect on negative emotion. Besides, the interaction effect between outcome and processing style on positive and negative emotion was significant. So these results suggested that processing style moderated the emotional reactions to fair or unfair outcome allocation.Study 2 is based on study 1, which used a laboratory method, and also a 2 × 2 between-group experiment was conducted. However, we manipulated the accuracy of the procedure of outcome allocation to indicate procedural justice instead of distributive justice. Results from a sample of 91 college students showed that both the procedure and processing style had main significant effect on positive emotion, negative emotion and cooperation intention. And the interaction effect between procedure and processing style on positive and negative emotion was similar to the results of study 1, in addition, the interaction effect on cooperation intention was also significant.In other words, processing style moderated both emotional and behavioral reactions to procedural justice.Study 3 also used scenario method and a 2 (processing style:experiential vs. rational)×2 (interpersonal treatment:fair vs. unfair) factorial design, with participants randomly assigned to conditions. In order to explore how victim justice sensitivity influences the relationship between processing style and the reactions to justice we also measured participants’ victim justice sensitivity by the Justice Sensitivity Scale. Compared with college students in two previous studies, employees participated in this study. Results showed that all independent variables and the interaction had non-significant effect on positive emotion, while interpersonal treatment, processing style, and the interaction effect between them on negative emotion and cooperation intention was significant. But three the interaction effect among independent variables on emotion and cooperation was not significant. That is, processing style also moderated the reactions towards fair treatment in interpersonal situations, victim justice sensitivity moderated the relationship between processing style and cooperation intention, but the hypothesis that victim justice sensitivity can moderate the relationship between processing style and emotional reactions to justice didn’t be verified.At last we analysis and discuss the limitation and the research design in future.