Abstract
Other-related concerns for justice are fundamental components of morality and interpersonal behaviors. In this paper, we investigated macro/cultural and micro/individual differences in justice concerns for others. More specifically, beneficiary sensitivity (BS) and observer sensitivity (OS) were compared across China as a typical collectivist society, and Germany and Russia as two individualistic societies. Individualism–collectivism was assumed to mediate the cultural variance of BS and OS. In Study 1, Chinese participants exhibited more BS but less OS compared to German participants. In Study 2, the Chinese participants exhibited more BS but not significantly different OS compared to Russian participants. Moreover, collectivism mediated this cultural difference in BS but not OS. In Study 3, collectivist participants identified according to their proposals in social value games exhibited more BS than did individualistic participants, while the two groups revealed no significant difference in OS. Taken together, our studies consistently show that higher collectivism both on the cultural and individual levels is related to BS but not to OS, suggesting that collectivist values make people sensitive to self-advantage in comparison to the suffering of others.
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Acknowledgments
We would like to express our gratitude to Drs. Tanja Nazlic, Jie Yuan, and Fei Wang for their assistance with the scale translation. We thank the participants. We thank Dr. Xiaojuan Jing, Dr. Yufeng Huang, Miss Qing Guo, Miss Qing Jia, and Mr. Lunzhou Luo for their help with data collection. We thank Dr. Axel Zinkernagel for his help with the statistics, and Dr. Tobias Rothmund for his comments on the early presentation.
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Wu, M.S., Schmitt, M., Zhou, C. et al. Examining Self-Advantage in the Suffering of Others: Cross-Cultural Differences in Beneficiary and Observer Justice Sensitivity Among Chinese, Germans, and Russians. Soc Just Res 27, 231–242 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11211-014-0212-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11211-014-0212-8