Abstract
In this study we show that experiencing physical pain interacts with justice related cognition and serves to reduce justice-restoring behavior in the context of interpersonal moral transgressions. This is because concepts of punishment and justice are embodied within the experience of pain, allowing for a sense of atonement from one’s wrongdoings. Two thirds of the participants were induced to feel that their performance in a two player game was unfair. Half of those participants were then asked to engage in a physically painful task, and were afterwards less likely to make amends for past poor performance compared to players who completed a similar, but non-painful task. This effect was only evident for participants who are particularly sensitive to personal injustices and therefore sensitive to the justice restoring qualities of pain.
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Notes
The performance task was pretested to ensure that the bogus-feedback was believable. The letters were only briefly presented, and during that brief moment participants were focused on the keyboard to search for the correct key, therefore, it was difficult to determine whether one had hit the correct key on time or not. This made the (difference in) bogus-feedback believable.
Other measures included in the questionnaire-packet focused on bodily sensitivity, i.e., the private body consciousness subscale of the self-consciousness inventory (Fenigstein et al. 1975) and the Highly Sensitive Person Scale (HSPS; Aron and Aron 1997), also the Just World-Scale (Rubin and Peplau 1975) was included. We did not have clear hypotheses about these measures, nor were these measures relevant for the hypotheses underlying the present study.
This cooks distance was calculated from regressing the interaction term onto the dependent variable. When this case was included the interaction effect of justice sensitivity and condition in predicting reparation behavior was not significant (β = −35, p = .11).
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van Bunderen, L., Bastian, B. “I have paid my dues”: When physical pain reduces interpersonal justice motivations. Motiv Emot 38, 540–546 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-014-9403-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-014-9403-8