Although fairness has been widely accepted, individuals' judgments about the fairness of events are not set in stone. Based on the construal-level theory, we examined individuals' judgments of unfair events under different social, temporal, and spatial distance contexts. Since previous work has found inconsistent results on the effect of construal levels on judgments, we proposed two possible hypotheses: “higher-level construals derived strict judgment hypothesis”, and “lower-level construals derived strict judgment hypothesis”. Given the important influence of individual fairness sensitivity on fairness judgments, we also examined the moderating role of fairness sensitivity in the relation between construal levels and unfair event judgments.
Three studies were conducted, which manipulated the construal levels by social distance (e.g., the distance between the actor who made the unfair event and the participants themselves), temporal distance (e.g., the distance between the unfair event and present time), and spatial distance (e.g., the distance between the unfair event and present space), respectively. Each study included 2 sub-experiments. To improve external validity and attenuate the interference of material familiarity, experiments a and b in each study used two typical unfairness events, respectively. That is, a teacher giving one student sympathy scores for his grades which was familiarity with student participants, and the phenomenon of hiring nepotism which was relatively unfamiliar with student participants.
Six experiments in 3 studies consistently supported the “higher-level construals derived strict judgment hypothesis”. That is, individuals judged the unfair event more unfair when they adopted higher-level construals compared to lower-level construals. These consistent findings from social distance, temporal distance, and spatial distance studies indicated our results were robust, which addressed the first purpose of our study. Additionally, 6 experiments also found the moderating effect of fairness sensitivity between construal levels and unfair event judgments. With the exception of Experiment 2b, 5 experiments consistently showed that the higher the fairness sensitivity, the smaller the effect of construal levels on unfair event judgments. In other words, for individuals with high fairness sensitivity, there was no difference in the effect of the two types of construal levels on unfair event judgments. In contrast, for individuals with low fairness sensitivity, higher-level construals led to unfair event judgments as more unfair; lower-level construals on unfair event judgments instead were not as strict. The moderation pattern of Experiment 2b was opposite to the other 5 experiments. This opposite pattern may be due to the manipulation methods of time distance, since we manipulated the time as “toady” and “three years later”, respectively, which was different from the methods in previous study as “tomorrow” and “three years later”. However, there was more evidence to support our hypothesis that there were few differences for individuals with high fairness sensitivity when they used different construal levels to judge the unfair events, which solved our second research question.
In conclusion, our study provides the first evidence that how construal levels influence unfair event judgments. This contributes to revealing the underlying psychological mechanisms of unfair judgments, and the role of individuals' level of mental constructs (abstract or concrete representations of events), thus clarifying the controversial results in the existing research. Findings also contribute to deepening our understanding of the dual processing involving rational cognition and perceptual emotion in unfairness judgments.
Key words
unfair event judgment /
construal levels /
psychological distance /
fairness sensitivity
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