Abstract
Injustice experiences are likely to have a strong impact on—adolescents' life. However, individuals differ in how they perceive and respond to injustice depending on their justice sensitivity. Whereas several studies analyzed the relationships between justice sensitivity and antisocial behaviors in adult samples, little is known about this relationship among adolescents. The aim of the present experimental study is to expand knowledge on the antecedents and effects of justice sensitivity from the Victim (i.e., JS-Victim) and Others (i.e., JS-Observer, Perpetrator, and Beneficiary) perspective, particularly with regard to its relationship to willingness to act in dishonest behavioral intentions (e.g., stealing money or objects from classmates, teachers, or strangers). The study involved 369 Italian students (52% males; M age = 16.64, SD = 1.78). We examined the role of justice sensitivity in the relationship between the recall of unfair, fair, or neutral episodes, and the consequent willingness to perform dishonest behaviors. Results demonstrate that recalling unfair (vs. fair or neutral) episodes leads to an increase in JS-Others, which in turn decreased willingness to behave dishonestly. Conversely, JS-Victim did not mediate the relationship between the recall of unfair episodes and intentions to behave dishonestly. The present findings suggest that during adolescence JS-Others might act as a protective factor against dishonest behaviors.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Since having recruited participants within their classes could raise concerns about the non-independence in the data structure, we performed a series of mixed method analyses of variance, in which, for each dependent variable, we compared the models with fixed effects only (i.e., those used in the analyses reported in the remainder of this work and retained as the reference model) with (a) model including the random intercept effect across classes, and (b) a model including both random intercept and random slope effects. Results revealed than in no case random effects turned out to be significant, thus meaning that neither mean levels of the VDs nor the size of the observed effects of the VI significantly varied across classes. More importantly, classroom-level factors accounted for a very small portion of the error variability, and in no case the fit of the models (as measured by the AIC index) improved when random effects were included in the analyses. The pattern of fixed effects remained unchanged across all the analyses.
We further tested two distinct models with JS-Victim and JS-Others as unique mediators, and results did not change.
Research findings did not change with the inclusion of the source of the episodes as a moderator between the type of episodes and the willingness to behave dishonestly.
References
Adams, J. S. (1965). Inequity in social exchange. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 2, 267–299.
Aquino, K., & Reed, A. (2002). The self-importance of moral identity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83, 1423–1440. https://doi.org/10.1037//0022-3514.83.6.1423.
Baumert, A., Beierlein, C., Schmitt, M., Kemper, C. J., Kovaleva, A., Liebig, S., et al. (2014). Measuring four perspectives of justice sensitivity with two items each. Journal of Personality Assessment, 96(3), 380–390. https://doi.org/10.1080/00223891.2013.836526.
Baumert, A., & Schmitt, M. (2009). Justice-sensitive interpretations of ambiguous situations. Australian Journal of Psychology, 61(1), 6–12. https://doi.org/10.1080/00049530802607597.
Baumert, A., & Schmitt, M. (2016). Justice sensitivity. In C. Sabbagh & M. Schmitt (Eds.), Handbook of social justice theory and research (pp. 161–180). New York: Springer.
Baumert, A., Thomas, N., & Schmitt, M. (2012). Justice sensitivity as resource or risk factor of civic engagement. In K. J. Jonas & T. A. Morton (Eds.), The psychology of intervention and engagement following crisis (pp. 19–37). Oxford: Wiley. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118347683.ch2.
Bondü, R., & Elsner, B. (2015). Justice sensitivity in childhood and adolescence. Social Development, 24(2), 420–441. https://doi.org/10.1111/sode.12098.
Bondü, R., & Richter, P. (2016). Linking forms and functions of aggression in adults to justice and rejection sensitivity. Psychology of Violence, 6(2), 292–302. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0039200.
Bondü, R., & Krahé, B. (2015). Links of justice and rejection sensitivity with aggression in childhood and adolescence. Aggressive Behavior, 41(4), 353–368. https://doi.org/10.1002/ab.21556.
Chaparro, M. P., Kim, H., Fernández, A., & Malti, T. (2013). The development of children’s sympathy, moral emotion attributions, and moral reasoning in two cultures. European Journal of Developmental Psychology, 10(4), 495–509. https://doi.org/10.1080/17405629.2012.742008.
Cohen, J. (1988). Statistical power analysis for the behavioral sciences (2nd ed.). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Dar, Y., & Resh, N. (2001). Exploring the multifaceted structure of sense of deprivation. European Journal of Social Psychology, 31(1), 63–81. https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.32.
Faccenda, L., Pantaléon, N., & Reynes, E. (2009). Significant predictors of soccer players’ moral functioning from components of contextual injustice, sensitivity to injustice and moral atmosphere. Social Justice Research, 224, 399–415. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11211-009-0105-4.
Faul, F., Erdfelder, E., Lang, A. G., & Buchner, A. (2007). G*Power 3: A flexible statistical power analysis program for the social, behavioral, and biomedical sciences. Behavior Research Methods, 39, 175–191.
Fetchenhauer, D., & Huang, X. (2004). Justice sensitivity and distributive decisions in experimental games. Personality and Individual Differences, 36(5), 1015–1029. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0191-8869(03)00197-1.
Gollwitzer, M., Rothmund, T., Alt, B., & Jekel, M. (2012). Victim sensitivity and the accuracy of social judgments. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 38(8), 975–984. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167212440887.
Gollwitzer, M., Rothmund, T., Pfeiffer, A., & Ensenbach, C. (2009). Why and when justice sensitivity leads to pro-and antisocial behavior. Journal of Research in Personality, 43(6), 999–1005. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2009.07.003.
Gollwitzer, M., Schmitt, M., Schalke, R., Maes, J., & Baer, A. (2005). Asymmetrical effects of justice sensitivity perspectives on prosocial and antisocial behavior. Social Justice Research, 18(2), 183–201. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11211-005-7368-1.
Greenberg, J. (1988). Equity and workplace status: A field experiment. Journal of Applied Psychology, 73, 600–613.
Greenberg, J. (1993). Stealing in the name of justice: Informational and interpersonal moderators of theft reactions to underpayment inequity. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 54(1), 81–103.
Hayes, A. F. (2013). Introduction to mediation, moderation, and conditional process analysis. A regression-based approach. New York: Guilford Press.
Hayes, A. F., & Preacher, K. J. (2014). Statistical mediation analysis with a multicategorical independent variable. British Journal of Mathematical and Statistical Psychology, 67(3), 451–470. https://doi.org/10.1111/bmsp.12028.
Hoffman, M. L. (2000). Empathy and moral development: Implications for caring and justice. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Horan, S. M., Chory, R. M., & Goodboy, A. K. (2010). Understanding students’ classroom justice experiences and responses. Communication Education, 59(4), 453–474. https://doi.org/10.1080/03634523.2010.487282.
Horton, K. (2004). International aid: The fair shares factor. Social Theory and Practice, 30(2), 161–174. https://doi.org/10.5840/soctheorpract200430212.
Kastenmüller, A., Greitemeyer, T., Hindocha, N., Tattersall, A. J., & Fischer, P. (2013). Disaster threat and justice sensitivity: A terror management perspective. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 43(10), 2100–2106. https://doi.org/10.1111/jasp.12163.
Lim, D., & DeSteno, D. (2016). Suffering and compassion: The links among adverse life experiences, empathy, compassion, and prosocial behavior. Emotion, 16(2), 175. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000144.
Lotz, S., Schlösser, T., Cain, D. M., & Fetchenauer, D. (2013). The (in)stability of social preferences: Using justice sensitivity to predict when altruism collapses. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 93, 141–148. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2013.07.012.
Lupfer, M. B., Weeks, K. P., Doan, K. A., & Houston, D. A. (2000). Folk conceptions of fairness and unfairness. European Journal of Social Psychology, 30(3), 405–428. https://doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1099-0992(200005/06)30:3<405:AID-EJSP997>3.0.CO;2-U.
Mikula, G. (1994). Perspective-related differences in interpretations of injustice by victims and victimizers. A test with close relationships. In M. J. Lerner & G. Mikula (Eds.), Entitlement and the affectional bond (pp. 175–203). New York: Plenum.
Mohiyeddini, C., & Schmitt, M. J. (1997). Sensitivity to befallen injustice and reactions to unfair treatment in a laboratory situation. Social Justice Research, 10(3), 333–353. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02683307.
Moore, C., & Gino, F. (2013). Ethically adrift: How others pull our moral compass from true North, and how we can fix it. Research in Organizational Behavior, 33, 53–77. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.riob.2013.08.001.
Pennebaker, J. W. (1997). Writing about emotional experiences as a therapeutic process. Psychological Science, 8(3), 162–166. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.1997.tb00403.
Preacher, K. J., & Hayes, A. F. (2008). Asymptotic and resampling strategies for assessing and comparing indirect effects in multiple mediator models. Behavior Research Methods, 40(3), 879–891. https://doi.org/10.3758/BRM.40.3.879.
Pretsch, J., Ehrhardt, N., Engl, L., Risch, B., Roth, J., Schumacher, S., et al. (2016). Injustice in school and students’ emotions, well-being, and behavior: A longitudinal study. Social Justice Research, 29(1), 119–138. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11211-015-0234-x.
Rousseau, V., Salek, S., Aubé, C., & Morin, E. M. (2009). Distributive justice, procedural justice, and psychological distress: The moderating effect of coworker support and work autonomy. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 14(3), 305–317. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0015747.
Schmitt, M. (1998). Gerechtigkeit und Solidaritaet im wiedervereinigten Deutschland [Justice and solidarity in the re-united Germany]. In B. Reichle & M. Schmitt (Eds.), Verantwortung, Gerechtigkeit und Moral [Responsibility, justice and morality] (pp. 87–99). Weinheim: Juventa.
Schmitt, M., Baumert, A., Gollwitzer, M., & Maes, J. (2010). The justice sensitivity inventory: Factorial validity, location in the personality facet space, demographic pattern, and normative data. Social Justice Research, 23, 211–238. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11211-010-0115-2.
Schmitt, M., Gollwitzer, M., Maes, J., & Arbach, D. (2005). Justice sensitivity. European Journal of Psychological Assessment, 21(3), 202–211. https://doi.org/10.1027/1015-5759.21.3.202.
Schmitt, M. J., & Mohiyeddini, C. (1996). Sensitivity to befallen injustice and reactions to a real-life disadvantage. Social Justice Research, 9(3), 223–238. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02197249.
Schmitt, M. J., Neumann, R., & Montada, L. (1995). Dispositional sensitivity to befallen injustice. Social Justice Research, 8(4), 385–407. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02334713.
Schwarzwald, J., Koslowsky, M., & Shalit, B. (1992). A field study of employees’ attitudes and behaviors after promotion decisions. Journal of Applied Psychology, 77, 511–514.
Staub, E. (2003). The psychology of good and evil: Why children, adults and groups help and harm others. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Staub, E. (2005). The roots of goodness: The fulfillment of basic human needs and the development of caring, helping and nonaggression, inclusive caring, moral courage, active bystandership, and altruism born of suffering. In G. Carlo & C. Edwards (Eds.), Moral motivation through the life span (pp. 34–72). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Stavrova, O., Schlösser, T., & Baumert, A. (2014). Life satisfaction and job-seeking behavior of the unemployed: The effect of individual differences in justice sensitivity. Applied Psychology, 63(4), 643–670. https://doi.org/10.1111/apps.12009.
Thorkildsen, T. A. (1989). Pluralism in children’s reasoning about social justice. Child Development, 60(4), 965–972. https://doi.org/10.2307/11311036.
Tyler, T. R. (1990). Why people obey the law: Procedural justice, legitimacy, and compliance. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Van den Bos, K. (2003). On the subjective quality of social justice: The role of affect as information in the psychology of justice judgments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85(3), 482. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.85.3.482.
Van den Bos, K., Vermunt, R., & Wilke, H. A. (1997). Procedural and distributive justice: What is fair depends more on what comes first than on what comes next. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 72(1), 95. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.72.1.95.
Van der Graaff, J., Branie, S., De Wied, M., Hawk, S., Van Lier, P., & Meeus, W. (2014). Perspective taking and empathic concern in adolescence: Gender differences in developmental changes. Developmental Psychology, 50(3), 881–888. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0034325.
Vollhardt, J. R., & Staub, E. (2011). Inclusive altruism born of suffering: The relationship between adversity and prosocial attitudes and behavior toward disadvantaged outgroups. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 81, 307–315. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1939-0025.2011.01099.x.
Warner, R. H., Wohl, M. J. A., & Branscombe, N. R. (2014). When do victim group members feel a moral obligation to help suffering others? European Journal of Social Psychology, 44, 231–241. https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.2010.
Wijn, R., & van den Bos, K. (2010). Toward a better understanding of the justice judgment process: The influence of fair and unfair events on state justice sensitivity. European Journal of Social Psychology, 40(7), 1294–1301. https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.709.
Zitek, E. M., Jordan, A. H., Monin, B., & Leach, F. R. (2010). Victim entitlement to behave selfishly. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 98(2), 245–255. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0017168.
Acknowledgements
This study was made possible due a FIRB 2012 grant from the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research (MIUR; Grant Number RBFR128CR6).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
Ethical Approval
All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional committee (Ethical Committee of the University of Perugia) and with the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.
Appendix
Appendix
First Scenario
Yesterday morning your teacher called you to the chair because he/she wanted to ask you questions. While he/she thumbed through his/her personal agenda, you were able to see and memorize the password required for entry into the school’s electronic registry, where school grades are recorded. When you got home you tried to insert the teacher’s password into the registry on the school’s Web site and you manage to login to the electronic register.
Second Scenario
Yesterday afternoon you met one of your professors in front of the coffee machine. He/she asked you for change because he/she did not have any coins. You checked your wallet and saw that you had enough change. Once you walked away, you realized that you had made a mistake; you had not given him/her enough change and he had not noticed.
Third Scenario
During physical education hour you get very thirsty. You go in the locker room and look in your wallet for coins so that you can buy a bottle of water from the vending machine in the hallway. Unfortunately you do not have enough coins, but you realize that your classmate’s wallet is on the bench next to you.
Fourth Scenario
Tomorrow you will have a very important task at school, but you still did not buy the necessary materials. At the end of the school day, you and your classmates hurriedly exit the classroom. You realize that you forgot your umbrella in the classroom and you go back. On the teacher’s chair, you note a folder that belongs to your classmate. You approach the folder and inside you find the precise materials that you will need for the task.
Fifth Scenario
After you having shopped for a picnic lunch planned for the weekend, you go to the checkout of the supermarket. You pay, but the checkout assistant gives you the wrong change. He/she gives you more banknotes than he should have.
Sixth Scenario
You are traveling by train. The passenger next to you gets up because he/she has arrived at his destination. After a few minutes, you notice a small case on the seat where he had been sitting. On the case there is a small nameplate containing an address and a phone number. You open the case and you find a new and super equipped digital camera.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Giovannelli, I., Pacilli, M.G., Pagliaro, S. et al. Recalling an Unfair Experience Reduces Adolescents’ Dishonest Behavioral Intentions: The Mediating Role of Justice Sensitivity. Soc Just Res 31, 23–40 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11211-017-0299-9
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11211-017-0299-9