Egocentrism in Perceptions of Distributive Justice: When Favorable Outcomes Are Unfair Outcomes

Abstract

71 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2006.Previous research has suggested that judgments of distributive justice are egoistic (e.g. Greenwald, 1983). That is, people tend to think that outcomes that favor themselves are fair outcomes. However, I propose that judgments of distributive justice are often a product of egocentrism (e.g. Kruger, 1999). That is, people tend to focus more on their own contribution than on the contribution of their collaborators when making distributive justice judgments. This leads to a prediction of an interaction of amount of contribution with favorability of outcome, such that people who have contributed a lot to a task will think it is fairer for them to receive more favorable outcomes than others than to receive less favorable outcomes than others. However, this effect should be attenuated, or even reversed, when participants have contributed little to the task. Importantly, this should be true even when their collaborators have contributed just as much or just as little as they have. In the primary study, two participants answered trivia questions as part of a "quiz bowl team", were paid money for their performance, and were asked to evaluate the distributive justice of the payments. Results supported the hypothesis. Thus, favorable outcomes may be seen as fair when contributions are high, but unfair when contributions are low.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD