Distributive Justice Beliefs are Guided by Whether People Think the Ultimate Goal of Society is Well-Being or Power

Abstract

Disagreements about how resources should be distributed are often heated, perhaps because people suspect that distributive justice beliefs that clash with their own derive from nefarious motives. In this paper, we consider a less pessimistic explanation for diversity in distributive justice beliefs: such beliefs are influenced by what one considers the primary utility or value of their society in the first place. In five studies (N = 21,515), we demonstrate the existence of two separable types of distributive justice beliefs, one (Equality/need) influenced by a focus on societal well-being, and the other (Equity/merit) by a focus on societal power. These findings lend insight into how growing tensions rooted in resource allocation might be defuzed.

Disclosure statement

The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Templeton Foundation. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. The data used in this paper is available upon request.

Notes

Notes

1 See Weisberg (2011) for a comparison of the two movements.

2 Importantly, though here we measure distributive justice beliefs according to the perceived wrongness of different behaviors, in subsequent studies we measure evaluations of distribution rules using a number of different types of scales that use different wording (e.g. how just or unjust (Study 2), relevance to rightness or wrongness (Study 4), fairness and unfairness (Studies 5, 7a, and 7b). In each study, we intended to assess people’s distributive justice beliefs, but to the best of our knowledge there is not a single method of assessing this type of belief that is considered a gold standard for such purpose. By assessing people’s evaluations in multiple ways, we believe this increases our findings’ external validity and highlights their robustness.

3 Participants were asked about how relevant they considered “Whether or not someone was good at math” when deciding that something is right or wrong and they also reported how strongly they agreed with the statement “It is better to do good than to do bad.” Following previous guidelines, cases were not included in analyses if participants selected an option above “slightly relevant” for the former item or below “slightly agree” for the latter item.

4 In each study, we explored the moderating effect of gender on our results. Very rarely were patterns of results different as a function of gender, and in these rare situations, these differences were not meaningful. For this reason, and also because we did not hypothesize any moderating effects of gender, we do not currently report moderating effects of gender in this paper.

5 We should note that in Study 1a, these factors (Equity/merit and Equality/need) were positively related to each other, r(5619) = 0.49, d = 1.12.

6 In all studies, correlation coefficients used for comparisons only included data from participants who produced data for all three relevant variables (in this case, Care, Equality/need, and Equity/merit). On the other hand, when zero-order correlations are reported on their own, these are correlations derived for all available data.

7 Because distributive justice beliefs were always related to each other, this practice was used in all subsequent studies.

8 As in Study 1a, the measure used in Study 1b included items designed to assess procedural and retributive justice beliefs (for each dilemma, two questions were designed to assess procedural justice beliefs and one was designed to assess retributive justice beliefs). As in Study 1a, these items were used for exploratory purposes only.

9 In studies 1b and 3, Care and Binding scores were related to each other. Therefore, in these studies, we report the results of relevant regression analyses when both were simultaneously included as IVs as well as when they were not.

10 In keeping with our previous confirmatory factor analyses, we included the libertarian item with the other Equality/need items. Including this item with the Equity/merit items instead did not meaningfully change the results.

11 We tested whether these relationships remained when controlling for the alternate distributive justice belief because once again, they were related to one another, r(98) = 0.26, d = 0.58.

12 The pre-registration for Study 4b can be found here: https://osf.io/vk3n2/?view_only=e60c7d57b61e4776816f2572b5901c57

13 The pre-registration for Study 5b can be found here: https://osf.io/3mvdg/?view_only=90bb95eb01be46a5b778204511980221

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the John Templeton Foundation [Grant #21106].