ABSTRACT
Why do people care about justice? How do people reason about what is fair or unfair? To answer these questions, justice researchers have developed theories of justice reasoning based on their assumptions about people’s needs, desires, and motivations. For example, theories of social exchange assume people are rationally self-interested and will evaluate fairness through the lens of maximizing rewards. Alternatively, theories of procedural fairness assume people fundamentally need to belong to groups and will focus on the fairness of procedures as an indication of their worth to the group. Moral theories of justice reasoning assume people have fundamental beliefs about right and wrong and that people evaluate fairness in accordance with these beliefs. This chapter reviews these three theoretical perspectives and integrates them into a contingency theory of justice. The contingency theory of justice posits that how people define fairness depends on the current perspective of the perceiver (material, social, or moral perspective). Specifically, the authors propose that the perspective and motivations of the perceiver impact the factors people use to decide whether something is fair or unfair. The contingency theory of justice can account for the complexity and flexibility of people’s justice reasoning and 2how justice judgments vary both between and within persons over time. In addition, the theory suggests that an important area of future research inquiry is exploring how people cope with differences in their fairness judgments and how they resolve conflicts and arrive at a consensus that everyone can agree is fair.
