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Social Justice Research

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11-10-2021

Framing Perceptions of Justice in a Public Goods Dilemma

Published in: Social Justice Research | Issue 4/2021

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Abstract

In a social dilemma, group members have equal access to collective resources, but each must decide between acting in self-interested or collectively interested ways when considering their contribution to the group. Our research focused on how the perceived fairness of contributions and outcomes affects these decisions. We report on an experiment that manipulated two factors related to fairness: dilemma-framing that emphasized either individual or collective gains, and whether the partner’s relative contribution was high, low, or equal to the subject’s. Also, subjects’ social value orientations—individualist vs. prosocial—were balanced across conditions. Subjects made two rounds of contribution decisions and received feedback on their outcomes after each. As hypothesized for first-round contributions, prosocials contributed more to public goods and framing had no discernable effect. In the second round, neither social value orientation nor framing influenced participants’ fairness evaluations when partners made a low initial contribution to the group, but dilemma-framing affected participants’ fairness evaluations when the partner made a high contribution to the group. Importantly, results generally supported key hypotheses for participants’ attempts to rectify injustices via subsequent contributions and bonus sharing. Partner’s contributions, social value orientation, and dilemma-framing all affected redistributive behaviors.

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The SVO categorization also may include competitors who prefer to maximize their own outcome at other participants’ expense, and altruists who prefer to maximize other participants’ outcomes at their own expense. We have opted for the two-category version for the sake of simplicity.

As suggested by an anonymous reviewer, we reanalyzed the data using a full model, with contributions 1 and 2 treated as a repeated measure and all main and two-way interactions included. The ANOVA result was significant for the main effects of SVO and partner’s contribution in the between-subject factorial model and significant for the main effect of partner’s contribution and SVO-framing interaction for the within-subject test. Although results were consistent, our analysis more directly tested the theoretical-derived claim that predictable alterations in contributions from the first to the second trial occur in response to perceived (un)fairness in the first trial. The two trials were thus non-independent by design, in violation of assumptions for the suggested repeated-trials ANOVA.

The means and standard deviations tables for each dependent variable are available upon request.

We equalized the numbers of prosocials and individualists across the Community and Stock Market Studies, and the program randomly assigned participants to a high or low condition automatically. However, we could not equalize the numbers for all contribution conditions because participants’ first contribution was beyond our control. Therefore, we categorized those assigned to a low condition and contributed the lowest possible amount, i.e., zero, and those assigned to a high condition and gave the highest possible amount, i.e., 20 as an equal condition.

The fairness evaluation for self did not correlate well with the other three items and was dropped from the scale. It is possible that when individuals overly benefit from the interaction, they tended to avoid judging themselves as unfair. This means that self-serving bias may alter an individual’s justice judgments unreliably (Cook & Hegtvedt, 1986; Diekmann et al., 1997; Hegtvedt, 1992; Messick, 1995).

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Title: Framing Perceptions of Justice in a Public Goods Dilemma
Publication date: 11-10-2021
Published in: Social Justice Research / Issue 4/2021
Print ISSN: 0885-7466
Electronic ISSN: 1573-6725
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11211-021-00379-8