Perceiving Justice: An Attributional Perspective

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the relevance of several key issues that have been addressed by attribution theorists and researchers that are important for an understanding of justice. Perceptions of justice are based fundamentally on attributions of cause and responsibility. Whether one focuses on the person on the street, the subject in a research setting, the social theorist, or the philosopher, justice perceptions are grounded in these attributions. Their crucial importance can be observed by noting the following: (1) differences between individuals' perceptions of justice are based on differing attributions of cause and responsibility, attributional conflicts; (2) an individual's perception of justice will change as a consequence of changes in these attributions; and (3) individuals asked to describe and explain their justice perceptions search for attributional information and base their explanations on appeals to such information. Attempts by social psychologists to understand lay perceptions of justice are often forced to invoke implicit assumptions about causal and responsibility beliefs. Important philosophical disagreements on the nature of justice rest in a fundamental way on differing assessments of the extent to which persons can be held morally responsible for their characteristics and actions in a given context and social structure.