540 Justice, Equity, and Fairness in Human Relations
unusual for social movements to be initiated and supported by
people without any vested interests of their own. Think of
Keniston’s (1970) study of young radicals involved in the
anti–Vietnam-war movement, and of the studies Haan, Smith,
and Block (1968) and Fishkin, Keniston, and McKinnon
(1973) have conducted about activists in the 1960s civil rights
movement. Moral orientations and social responsibility were
the motivational bases identified here. Phenomena such as the
survivor guilt described for Holocaust survivors (L. Baron,
1987), Hiroshima survivors (Lifton, 1967), and released pris-
oners of war (Lifton, 1954) demonstrate that not all people
who have been favorably advantaged are able to enjoy their
good fortune.
They perceive the disadvantaged victims as belonging to
their own community of solidarity (Deutsch, 1985), whereby
equality and need are postulated to be the preferred justice
principles (Deutsch, 1975) and communal orientations are
prevalent (Clark & Chrisman, 1994; Lerner & Whitehead,
1980). Managers’ feelings of guilt after layoff decisions
(Lerner, 1996) indicate that members of the management feel
more obligations toward the staff than expected. Guilt felt by
survivors of layoffs (Brockner, 1994) is another example. As
Cohen (1986) has pointed out, the application of standards of
justice depends on the psychological boundaries of the com-
munity one has in mind. Susan Opotow (1996) uses the term
scope of justiceto depict the fact that some people draw their
personal boundaries much wider than do others. Those who
are concerned about global inequalities (Olson, 1997) have a
wide scope of justice. If self-interest is the dominant concern,
the scope of justice will not be extended to include those who
are disadvantaged relative to oneself.
We have studied the ways in which relatively privileged
people respond to the misery, the problems, and the poor life
conditions of less fortunate others: poor people in developing
countries, unemployed individuals in their own countries,
physically handicapped people, and foreign guest workers
with unfavorable working and living conditions (Montada,
Schmitt, & Dalbert, 1986; Montada & Schneider, 1989, 1991;
Montada, Schneider, & Reichle, 1988). How do people in rel-
atively privileged life situations respond emotionally when
confronted with the hardships and the misery of the disadvan-
taged? Do they respond with sympathy or angry reproaches,
pride in their own achievements, satisfaction about their
higher standards of living, feelings of guilt about their rela-
tively privileged situations (which they may not consider to
be entirely deserved), or resentment about the unjust treat-
ment of the disadvantaged? We found large interindividual
differences in these emotional responses. Guilt feelings—
which in this case we calledexistential guiltandresentment—
were with respect to their intensity normally distributed
emotions in large heterogeneous samples, rather than being
rare or exotic abnormalities. Guilt and resentment have mean-
ingful correlates; some examples include perception of the
existing inequalities as unjust, cognitions that one’s own
higher standard of living and the lower standard of living of
others are causally related, or cognitions that the inequalities
could be reduced by redistribution—and preference for
the need-based principle of distributive justice (over the
contribution-proportional principle). It has been shown that
both guilt and resentment dispose people to perform prosocial
activities in favor of the disadvantaged (guilt is more closely
associated with personal sacrifices, resentment with political
protest). It could also be proved that guilt and resentment
were not reducible to self-interests of the privileged which
was also assessed in these studies—namely, in terms of fear of
losses through forced redistribution and anger at the disad-
vantaged because of their lack of self-help. Guilt and resent-
ment proved to be not reducible to fear of loss or to anger at
the disadvantaged.
In these studies, we tried to disentangle justice and self-
interest by looking more closely at people who are better off
than others are, consider their views and standards of justice
violated to their own advantage, and feel morally uneasy
about this situation. They feel responsible for helping to cor-
rect the injustice. Other researchers (De Rivera, Gerstman, &
Maisels, 1994; Edelstein & Krettenauer, 1996) have come to
similar conclusions. Such findings recall those of equity re-
search, in which distress was observed in people who were
overbenefited.
Whereas justice claims arising from a position of relative
deprivation can easily be interpreted to be self-interested, this
is not the case when justice is claimed for the disadvantaged
by those in a more privileged position. From the perspective
of rational choice theory, one could of course askIsn’t it a
rational choice, serving self-interest in the long run, to
correct the gross inequalities existing all over the world, for
instance, to prevent violent rebellion by the disadvantaged?
The counterquestion to this would beWhy guilt and re-
sentment instead of fear of their violent efforts to restore
equality—or instead of cool, strategic deliberation how to
prevent their violent attacks at the status quo?
Whenever self-interest has been assessed and factor ana-
lyzed together with justice scales, the independence of these
variables was demonstrated (e.g., Montada & Schneider,
1990; Moschner, 1998).Traps of ReductionismReducing the number of human motives seems to correspond
to the ideal of parsimony in theory construction. Of two