Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures and Tables
- Preface
- 1 Contesting the Primacy of Self-Interest
- 2 Why Does Justice Matter? The Development of a Personal Contract
- 3 Commitment to Justice: The Initial Primary Automatic Reaction
- 4 Explaining the Myth of Self-Interest
- 5 Defining the Justice Motive: Reintegrating Procedural and Distributive Justice
- 6 How People Assess Deservingness and Justice: The Role of Social Norms
- 7 Integrating Justice and Self-Interest: A Tentative Model
- 8 Maintaining the Commitment to Justice in a Complex World
- 9 Bringing It Closer to Home: Justice in Another “American Tragedy”
- 10 Emotional Aftereffects: Some Negative Consequences and Thoughts on How to Avoid Them
- References
- Author Index
- Subject Index
Preface
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 May 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures and Tables
- Preface
- 1 Contesting the Primacy of Self-Interest
- 2 Why Does Justice Matter? The Development of a Personal Contract
- 3 Commitment to Justice: The Initial Primary Automatic Reaction
- 4 Explaining the Myth of Self-Interest
- 5 Defining the Justice Motive: Reintegrating Procedural and Distributive Justice
- 6 How People Assess Deservingness and Justice: The Role of Social Norms
- 7 Integrating Justice and Self-Interest: A Tentative Model
- 8 Maintaining the Commitment to Justice in a Complex World
- 9 Bringing It Closer to Home: Justice in Another “American Tragedy”
- 10 Emotional Aftereffects: Some Negative Consequences and Thoughts on How to Avoid Them
- References
- Author Index
- Subject Index
Summary
The 1980 monograph Belief in a Just World: A Fundamental Delusion concluded with a “last thought.” It contained the following recommendations concerning what should happen next:
Much remains to be done. As scientists and people who care about one another we need to understand more about the social psychological processes which generate this commitment to deserving and justice. Why do people care about justice? This concern is ultimately tied to the need to solve the riddle of what decides the particular form that justice takes in a given situation. At times, people feel that justice is served when people's needs are most effectively met; at other times, people's deserving is seen as relative to their effort, their contributions to a task, their station in life, [or] what they can win in a fair competition (Lerner, 1975). And both of these sets of problems are inextricably bound up with the way people decide who is in their “world,” and what place they have in that world.
(Lerner, 1980, p. 194)The present monograph reviews the contributions of many investigators over the past thirty years in order to provide answers to those centrally important questions. Consistent with the style adopted in the earlier volume, we generated a narrative that provides the reader with our thoughts as we examined a wide range of theories and data. Much of this narrative consists of critical analyses and arguments for rejecting and reinterpreting entire lines of research as well as the theories that generated them.
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- Information
- Justice and Self-InterestTwo Fundamental Motives, pp. ix - xPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011