ABSTRACT
Perhaps the greatest shift in the psychology of justice in the last two decades has been the acknowledgement and theorizing of the link between justice and identity; specifically social identity, which derives from one’s membership in a social group, together with its emotional and evaluative connotations (Tajfel, 1978). This link can be understood to be bidirectional, with identity determining notions of justice, deservingness and entitlements; and justice or injustice affecting those subjected to it in terms of their sense of identity, inclusion/exclusion, status, and group values. Such theoretical notions found their impact first in the area of procedural justice, that is, the fairness of decision-making processes (Lind & Tyler, 1988), coinciding with the discovery that people’s perceptions of justice are affected by the quality of their interpersonal treatment such as politeness and respect (Bies & Moag, 1986). These findings did not fit the theoretical mould of then prevalent instrumental models which regarded concerns about fair procedures as driven by the interest in achieving favourable and fair outcomes (e.g., Thibaut & Walker, 1975). While the identity-relevance of procedural justice has been contrasted with a self-interested concern about distributive justice (e.g., Tyler, 1994), that is, the fairness of outcomes and resource distributions, more recent theoretical and empirical work argues that distributive justice is also based in identity processes (Skitka, 2003; Tyler & Blader, 2003; Wenzel, 2004). Furthermore, retributive justice, that is, the fairness of sanctioning responses to rule-breaking and acts of injustice, has also seen the application of identity-based models (Tyler, Boeckmann, Smith, & Huo, 1997; Vidmar, 2000), but such theoretical perspectives are still emerging (e.g., Wenzel, Okimoto, Feather, & Platow, 2008). In this chapter, I briefly retrace a selection of theoretical notions with regard to the justice-identity link in the areas of distributive and procedural justice, before then outlining for the area of retributive justice a more recent identity-based model of victim responses to rule-breaking. The aim is, first, to advance a more integrative understanding of the multi-faceted justice concept and its interconnections with identity. Second, given that social identity is at the heart of intergroup relations, the theme of this book, I discuss implications of identity-based conceptualizations of justice for intergroup behaviour.
