A Study On Justice Based On Emotion

It is just in recent years that researches on justice have been conducted from the perspective of emotion, which is also the frontier field of researches on the justice. Although some researchers try to integrate the theory of justice and emotion theory, there are still so many problems unresolved. In China, this field is nearly in a state of emptiness. For a long time, scholars have investigated the process of justice judgments from the perspectives of cognition. From these perspectives, people are looked upon as absolute rationalists. They analyze, estimate and weigh relevant information before judgments, then make their rational judgments without being influenced by emotion. When we have enough time and resources, this process may be applicable. However, in many situations, people can not gain all of the necessary cognitive resources. That is to say, in the case of information uncertainty, people's justice judgments may be powerfully influenced by emotion. So this research removes the limitation of "cool" cognition in research content, and select emotion, a most psychologically characterized factor, as the focus of this research. This paper investigated the effects of emotion on justice judgments from a functional perspective. On the other hand, although many researchers are concerned about outcome variables of organizational justice, they focus more on the variables of attitude and behaviors, but less on emotional variables. As an antecedent variable, emotion affects perception of justice. At the same time, as an outcome variable, emotion is also affected by existing perception of justice.For discussing the problems mentioned above and thoroughly illustrating the relationship between emotion and justice, this paper consists of four parts as follow:The first part provided an review. The history and current situation of researches on justice and emotion were retrospected systematically. Main theories and representative thoughts in these two fields were also demonstrated. Then,the research hypotheses were promoted correspondingly.The second part included six experiments. Both classic experiment methods in psychology and research paradigm of game theory in economics were applied in this research. The researches mainly included, (1) under uncertain conditions, the effects of individual emotion on justice judgments, (2) under ambiguous conditions, the effects of emotion of others on justice judgments, (3) the effects of emotion and social value orientation on distributive justice, (4) the effects of justice perception on discrete emotion. The four researches mentioned above can come to conclusions as follow. First, uncertainty mediated the relationship between emotion and justice judgments. Under the conditions of information uncertainty, emotion acted as information. Individuals with positive emotion easily tended to make just decisions. And individuals with negative emotion inclined to unjust judgments. But under certainty conditions, the effect of emotion was not significant. Second, individual justice judgments were influenced by emotion of others. Under the situation of ambiguous information, individuals make lower perception of justice judgments if other person express anger, and higher if other person display guilt. Third, there are different effects of emotion, social value orientation and game orders on distributive justice. Social value orientation displayed significant effects on individual offers in two games. Individuals with pro-self orientation gived fewer offers both in Ultimatum Game and Dictator Game and more concern about self-interest than with pro-social orientation. Emotion displayed significant influence on offers in Ultimatum Game. Individuals offered more money to others when they were in a pleasure state as opposed to anger state. Game order had no significant effects on offers, but the interaction between game order and social value orientation significantly influenced the offers in Dictator Game. Fourth, individual emotional states were influenced by distributive outcome and distributive process. Happiness, disappointment and pride were influenced only by outcome, whereas guilt and anger were influenced by combinations of outcome and procedure. Anger was highest when an unfavorable outcome occurred because of an unfair procedure. Higher level of guilt was reported when an unfair procedure resulted in a favorable outcome.The third part provided a general discussion. Based on the results of this paper, a suite of issues were discussed profoundly and extensively. The discussions covered such topics as the mediating effects of information uncertainty on emotion and justice judgments, emotion as information function in justice judgments, individual fairness preference in resource distribution, the influence of distributive outcome and process on emotion. In addition, the paper provided a new perspective on improving perception of organizational justice and enforcing management effectiveness by the way of enhancing emotional management.In the fourth part, the innovation and deficiency of this paper were discussed, and a direction for future researches was proposed from such aspects as the clarification of concepts, improvement of research methods, extension of analysis levels, construction of theory framework, and etc.