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When Fairness is Especially Important: Reactions to Being Inequitably Paid in Communal Relationships

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Abstract

This article focuses on when justice is especially important to people and, in doing so, explores the social conditions under which the importance of justice may change in social interactions. More specifically, the authors examine how different types of relationships affect evaluations of equitable and inequitable situations. It is argued that when people are confronted with friends as interaction partners, as opposed to unknown others, they are motivated to attend to the needs of their friends (Clark & Mills, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37, 12–24, 1979) and, therefore, they are not only concerned with their own outcomes, but also with their friends’ outcomes. As predicted on the basis of this line of reasoning, two experiments demonstrate that when people’s interaction partners are friends, people are indeed more satisfied with being underpaid and less satisfied with being overpaid compared to when their interaction partners are unknown others. In the discussion, it is argued that these findings suggest that justice is especially important to people when they are in communal relationships.

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Notes

  1. The precise gender distribution of the participants in this experiment was unknown to the experimenters. Usually we do not find gender differences in our equity studies (see e.g., Peters, Van den Bos, & Bobocel, 2004; Peters, Van den Bos, & Karremans, 2005; Van den Bos et al., 2006; Van den Bos & Van Prooijen, 2001); this is an issue to which we will return in Experiment 2 (see Footnote 2).

  2. As expected (see Footnote 1) gender did not alter any of the results of Experiment 2, and hence was dropped from the analysis presented here. Unfortunately the number of participants was not enough to compare same-sex and mixed-sex pairs.

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Acknowledgments

The work in this article was supported by a grant from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO, 410-21-005-P). We would like to thank Johan C. Karremans for his comments on earlier drafts of this article; Nickie van der Wulp for her assistance in collecting the data of Experiment 1; and Sarah Alex, Eveline Hadewegg Scheffer, and Marieke Ossendrijver for their assistance in collecting the data of Experiment 2.

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  1. WODC, Ministry of Justice, The Hague, The Netherlands

    Susanne L. Peters

  2. Department of Social and Organizational Psychology, Utrecht University, Heidelberglaan 1, Utrecht, 3584 CS, The Netherlands

    Kees van den Bos

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  1. Susanne L. Peters
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  2. Kees van den Bos
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Correspondence to Kees van den Bos.

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Peters, S.L., van den Bos, K. When Fairness is Especially Important: Reactions to Being Inequitably Paid in Communal Relationships. Soc Just Res 21, 86–105 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11211-007-0056-6

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