Abstract
As Riël Vermunt, Ali Kazemi, and Kjell Törnblom point out in this chapter, resource allocations may be judged on the basis of the resulting final outcome and/or the procedures applied to arrive at the outcome. The focus of this chapter is on how attention to the outcome or procedure is affected by the nature of the allocated resource (universalistic versus particularistic) and the direction of allocation (when P is a provider versus a recipient). Results from a cross-national survey study involving respondents from Austria, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the USA showed that procedure was perceived as more focal in the allocation of universalistic as compared to particularistic resources. No differences were observed with regard to the salience of outcome. Interestingly, this held only true for resource providers; for resource recipients, this pattern was reversed. These and other findings suggest that the meaning of resource classes (in this study money and love) differ for providers and recipients in their judgments of allocation events. The authors conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for SRT and for future research.
We would like to thank Robert Folger, Gerold Mikula, and Paul van Lange for collecting the data in USA, Austria, Italy, and the Netherlands, respectively.
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Notes
- 1.
The valence of the resource and the outcome may not necessarily have the same sign. A student may be assigned extra homework (i.e., negative resource valence) which in turn might lead to better grades (i.e., positive outcome valence).
- 2.
The terms “distribution” and “outcome” will be used interchangeably to refer to the endstate of a resource allocation event.
- 3.
Outcomes and procedures may, of course, be evaluated in terms of various other types of criteria than salience, such as preference, acceptability, expediency, appropriateness, importance, impact, desirability, efficacy, satisfaction, and fairness. Various factors determine what values are assigned to each of these different criteria, and it may well be that some factors are appropriate for all criteria, while certain other factors are only meaningful for some of the criteria. In this study, we examine the impact of two factors – resource type and direction of allocation.
- 4.
The study reported herein included two additional variables, that is, social relationship and resource valence, the results from which will be reported elsewhere. For the purpose of this chapter and simplification of the original design we chose to focus on the roles of resource type and allocation direction for the perceived relative salience of outcome and procedure in resource allocation events.
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Vermunt, R., Kazemi, A., Törnblom, K. (2012). The Salience of Outcome and Procedure in Giving and Receiving Universalistic and Particularistic Resources. In: Törnblom, K., Kazemi, A. (eds) Handbook of Social Resource Theory. Critical Issues in Social Justice. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-4175-5_25
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