ABSTRACT
Melvin Lerner’s (1980) just-world theory proposes that people need to believe that the world is a just place where people get what they deserve. Over forty years of just-world research has compellingly demonstrated that people reinterpret their experiences to sustain a commitment to justice, with victim derogation and blame being the most researched examples of this process. Lerner and his colleagues’ original conceptualization of the justice motive as an organizing principle in people’s lives suggests the potential for manifestations of the concern for justice beyond victim derogation and blame. To that end, in this chapter the authors discuss a series of studies where they examined how the desire for justice—both for self and others—influences the ways people respond to and reconstruct more everyday occurrences of injustice. Specifically, in a first series of experiments (Studies 1 to 4), the authors explored people’s reactions to the fates of others in terms of their causal explanations for events and what they remembered about the past. In Studies 5 to 7, the authors demonstrated that people’s personal deservingness concerns can influence their desire to gamble and wanting of consumer goods.
