Fairness

Abstract

Judgments of fairness, justice, and morality are omnipresent in people’s lives. People value being treated fairly and to get respect from important figures, for instance, in-group members or societal authorities (Lind and Tyler 1998). Moreover, unjust situations can evoke intense emotions, such as moral outrage, both when these situations are personally experienced and also when they are merely witnessed (Lerner 1980). That is why a great wealth of research is concerned with issues of social justice, fairness, and morality in the field of social psychology. In the current contribution, we discuss individual differences in fairness judgments and propose a taxonomy of important antecedents of these judgments.