PROJECT SUMMARY: Collaborative Research Examining



PROJECT SUMMARY: Collaborative Research Examining

Emotional Reactions to Favorable Violations of Referential versus Equity Standards of Justice

How do people feel when they receive more than they deserve? The issue of over-reward is a central one in sociology, as the large-scale allocation and acceptance of rewards greater than one deserves often leads to widespread inequality. Though theories of justice generally predict that receiving more than one deserves will create distress, this prediction is not upheld in empirical research. While some studies find that over-reward produces higher levels of satisfaction and positive affect than does equity (e.g. Weiss, Suckow, and Cropanzano 1997), other studies report just the opposite (e.g. Van den Bos, et al. 2006). As a result, there remains great confusion regarding whether and when over-reward will produce negative emotion. Because the link between over-reward and negative emotion is a key tenant of equity theory, failure to address this issue has stymied efforts to advance justice theory.

This research proposal argues that conflicting findings regarding emotional reactions to over-reward are the result of variation in the justice standard employed across studies. Specifically, studies either use an equity-based standard of justice or a referential standard. In the equity-based standard, a “local” comparison is used to determine justice: justice exists when the ratio of inputs to outputs is equivalent across individuals (Homans 1974; Adams 1965). In the referential standard, the comparison is more distal – justice exists when one receives the “going rate” for a given activity (Berger, Cohen, and Zelditch 1972). Research on over-reward typically assumes that advantageous injustice will produce distress (if the over-reward is sufficiently large) whether the injustice is of an equity or referential form. Relatively little empirical attention has been given to this issue, however, and no studies have compared responses to violations of equity and referential standards of justice. Likewise, research has not examined whether contextual factors – such as publicizing the over-reward or the prospect of future interaction -- similarly affect reactions to over-reward in situations of equity and referential justice. As a result, we do not know the extent to which arguments regarding over-reward that were developed within an equity framework apply to over-reward in the framework of referential justice. If emotional reactions to violations of referential forms of justice are different from that of violations of equity-based justice, then it suggests that the mechanisms by which equity theory and the status value theory of distributive justice operate may also be different, thus calling for greater theoretical specification of reactions to over-reward.

The proposed research involves a series of experiments to be performed at the University of Georgia and Duke University. The studies build upon an experimental platform recently developed at these two sites. Three questions will be addressed: (1) How do people feel when they are over-rewarded, and is there variation in the emotional response depending upon the source of justice comparison?, (2) How does the promise of future interaction affect emotional reactions to referentially based and equity based forms of over-reward? (3) How does the public nature of the allocation affect emotional responses to referentially based and equity based forms of over-reward??

Intellectual Merit. Reactions to over-reward must be understood in order to explain why actors in social systems that perpetuate inequality are not in an almost constant state of distress. The proposed research makes two contributions to this effort: (1) the advancement of justice theory by testing a core prediction of equity theory, as well as by disentangling the effects of different justice comparisons (equity vs. referential) on emotional reactions to over-reward, (2) the adjudication of conflicting empirical findings regarding over-reward and emotion. These complimentary contributions may, ultimately, lead to a more nuanced understanding of why people accept over-reward.

Broader Impacts. The proposed research will provide training and mentoring opportunities for a diverse group of undergraduate and graduate research assistants. The findings and knowledge generated as part of this project will be widely disseminated through professional presentations, publications, and web access. Finally, the research findings have the potential to transform scholar’s conceptualization and measurement of over-reward.

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