Cross-Cultural Research

A brief overview of the articles in this special issue of Cross-Cultural Research on understanding the processes of judging justice is presented. Important features and contributions of the separate papers are summarized. In several cases, a critique and/or suggestions for further research are offered.

This article critically examines two major theoretical perspectives on justice in social psychology-equity and just world-particularly, the confusion between believing in justice versus believing that justice exists, and the neglected moral dimension of justice, the belief that God or transcendental law creates the universal imperative. Research on the implications for justice in life events confirms the hypothesis that justice is perceived when the valences of the person and the outcomes affecting that person are balanced, that this proposition holds in comparisons of US. and Indian samples, and that highly religious persons perceive more justice in life events than less or nonreligious persons.

The present article focuses on the distinction between descriptive (i.e., what will happen) and prescriptive (i.e., what should happen) beliefs in justice and shows that person valence and belief type had an interactive effect on outcome valence. Specifically, the 2 (Chinese and American culture) x 2 (Good and Bad person) x 2 (Will as descriptive and Should as prescriptive belief) study revealed that both Chinese and Americans believe that good people should receive better outcomes than they will; but Chinese believe that bad people should receive worse outcomes than they will, whereas Americans believe that bad people should receive better outcomes than they will. This may suggest that, in comparison with Chinese, Americans are more tolerant of or lenient toward immoral behavior and are prescriptively less committed to moral justice.

This article explores Korean adolescents' perceptions of justice and attributions of causal responsibility for an event presented in a narrative scenario. Factors varied in the design included partici pant's gender (male vs. female), scenario target person's gender (male vs. female), the target person's personal history (good vs. bad), and the event outcome (positive vs. negative). Although, objectively, the scenario event outcome was random (a lottery), the majority of participants interpreted it in terms of Korean just-world beliefs. Quantitative analyses showed that the adolescents reported higher degrees of justice when the scenario person and outcome valences were correspondent than when they were noncorrespondent. Quali tative analyses of the adolescents' free-response comments about the scenario revealed justice perceptions and attributions of causal responsibility that were contingent on the target person's and the justice authority's (Haneul) fulfillment of role obligations pre scribed by Korean just-world beliefs (inkwaeungbo).

Several standard stories used to examine beliefs in justice in other (cross-national) settings were also used in this study. Additional stories were created to examine potential hypothesized differences in this population due to the nature of the original stimulus stories. The researchers also examined ways in which the participants made their decisions. Results suggest that determinations of justice do, indeed, have some fairly standard features, but that population- specific issues also may affect judgments. These contexting factors suggest further studies to help to account for the variability in justice judgments. Important underlying dynamics may be uncov ered by future studies focusing on the ways that participants arrive at their judgments.

Since the early 1980s, researchers have attempted to unravel the sources of a tendency for minority group members to report higher levels of discrimination directed at their group than at them selves personally. The favored explanation for this personal/group discrimination discrepancy has been denial of personal discrimi nation. However, subsequent research has revealed that this discrep ancy is not specific to the domain of discrimination, or to negative events, or even to minoritygroup members. Rather, it is a generalized personal/group discrepancy, perhaps explained by a culture-based heuristic that leads people to calculate the magnitude of the effect of an event to be proportional to the size of the social unit being affected. Thusgroups are affected more than individual persons and the size of the effect increases with the size of the group.