The Influence Of Group Attribution And Fairness On Conflict Resolution

What is justice? This issue has been discussed since the beginning of time. Justice’s definition varies from different person and different period. Previous studies focused on the retributive justice field, which mainly discussed how to punish perpetrators. Recent research on restorative justice provided a new way to study justice subject. Restorative justice’s study mainly concerned about how to repair the relationship between perpetrators and victims through compensation or constructive punishment. Many scholars include domestic and abroad, focus on how restorative and retributive justice would rebuild justice (Wenzel, Okimoto, Feather,&Platow,2008). Also, a large sum of scholars probe into factors which would influence subjects’ different justice preference. While among current domestic studies there is no discussion about group justice attitude after conflict. Therefore, this study has three purposes:first, to verify how the disadvantage group’s in-group member would react on justice choice, after conflict; second, to verify whether the feeling of group belongingness would affect subjects’justice choice; third, to verify how perpetrator’s in-group members would react to victims retributive justice request, and how victim’ s in-group members would react to perpetrator’s restorative justice request.This study includes two parts:Study1and Study2. Study1takes one factor between subject design, through set up in-group member as perpetrator or victim to build up a conflict story, then ask subjects to answer corresponding justice questions, Study1’s results reveal that, during the conflict, when the in-group member was the perpetrator, subjects would get higher restorative justice scores, less retributive justice scores than in-group member was the victim situation; Study2uses2(conflict situation: in-group perpetrator/in-group victim) X2(justice type: restorative judge/retributive judge)between subject design. Ask subjects to answer justice appropriateness questions and future conflict forecast questions. Study2’s results further reveal that when the justice judge is preferred, the feeling of appropriateness are higher, conflict predict scores are lower, vice versa. Two studies base on previous research, draw up a serious of materials which include conflict stories, justice questions, feeling of belongingness, appropriateness of justice and future conflict forecast questions, to investigate Nanjing colleges’students’ mind and behavior. Among these materials, group belongingness questions were used to distinguish representative in-group members.According to these results, this study’s conclusions as following:First, group belongingness doesn’t affect an individual’s justice preferences in the whole, but in different conflict situations, group belongingness do affect peoples’ degree of preference to restorative justice and retributive justice.Second, if the perpetrator was a general civilian(within the group),and the victim had more power, then subjects tended to choose restorative justice; if the perpetrator had more power (outside of the group), and the victim was a general civilian, then subjects tended to choose retributive justice.Third, when members from outside group was given a conflict solving method, which in line with the in-group members request, in-group members will give a high justice appropriateness score.Fourth, when out group members’conflict solving strategy can’t meet in-group members’ request, in-group members will refuse to reconcile or be more hostility and may take more violence acts to fight against out group members.