magazine issue 2 2013 / Issue 17

Justice seems not to be for all: Exploring the scope of justice

• written by Aline Lima-Nunes, Cicero Roberto Pereira & Isabel Correia
• edited by Clare Jonas

We hypothesized that this influence should only be true if it happened within a specific justice- perception setting: participants had to think that “the world is just” so as to legitimize the exclusion from the ingroup’s scope of justice and, therefore, the discriminatory behavior. This setting is important, because people need to “feel ok” with their decisions about others in order to maintain their sense of well-being. We applied justice perception to a broad explanation of how people legitimize discrimination against immigrants. In social psychology, when we test an explanation of how some variables are related we call it a model. The general model that we adapted to justice perception was the “Justified Discrimination Model” (JDM; Pereira, Vala, & Leyens, 2009; Pereira, Vala, & Costa-Lopes, 2010). This model shows how and when prejudice can lead to the search for explanations in order to justify and, consequently, legitimize discrimination when it faces opposition (e.g., anti- prejudice norm).

In our studies, we examined the role played by justice perceptions, such as the scope of justice and belief in a just world, in influencing legitimized discrimination against immigrants. We chose these two justice perceptions as justifying factors of discrimination because the scope of justice can be a justifying argument to derogate others and because belief in a just world is a fundamental belief that people receive the treatment that they deserve and deserve the treatment that they receive (Lerner, 1980).

To analyze the role played by justice perceptions, we used classical measures of prejudice against immigrants and belief in a just world (e.g., Dalbert, Montada & Schmitt, 1987; Pettigrew & Meertens, 1995) and we developed new measures to evaluate discrimination against immigrants (i.e. support for discriminatory policies) and exclusion from the scope of justice. We found that participants legitimized their prejudice and discrimination by saying that “our principles of justice are not applicable to immigrants' concerns”, that is, by excluding immigrants from the ingroup’s scope of justice. Thus, participants used a narrow scope of justice as a justifying argument to discriminate and this phenomenon was stronger among participants who believed that “the outgroup got what they deserved”.

In addition, we experimentally analyzed whether a (perceived) narrow scope of justice would influence discrimination against immigrants. We used the same justice- perception setting, priming participants with the thought that “the world is just” in order to examine whether or not discrimination would be influenced in the same way. As we predicted, participants showed higher support for discriminatory policies against immigrants when the ingroup’s scope of justice was perceived as narrow, especially in a social context where the idea that everybody gets what they deserve and deserve what they get was salient (the idea of a just world).