Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/250058 
Year of Publication: 
2021
Citation: 
[Journal:] Social Justice Research [ISSN:] 1573-6725 [Volume:] 34 [Issue:] 4 [Publisher:] Springer [Place:] Berlin [Year:] 2021 [Pages:] 397-427
Publisher: 
Springer, Berlin
Abstract: 
Despite Rawls' famous call to distinguish between justice and fairness, these and other justice-related words often seem to be used interchangeably by both ordinary people and justice researchers. Based on a survey-embedded question wording experiment ( N  = 4534) fielded in Germany as part of the GESIS Panel, we explore the effects of three justice words— "just," "fair," and "appropriate"—on the sense of justice about earnings for self and others. We observe differences in the just reward, justice evaluation, and justice consequences by justice word. For example, justice evaluations of one's own earnings are more negative, i.e., deeper in the underreward territory, signaling larger just rewards, when using "just" instead of "fair" or "appropriate" in the question wording. No such clear pattern emerges for justice evaluations of others' earnings. Our analyses show the decreasing effect of an underreward situation on psychosocial health to be significantly stronger in the "just" condition compared to the "fair" condition but do not reveal differential consequences by justice word for measures of satisfaction and trust. Overall, the observed differences by justice words are moderate in size. Nonetheless, our findings suggest caution for justice researchers in communicating with peers and respondents and warrant further inquiry extending research on the role of "justice language" to other language–country contexts.
Subjects: 
Justice words
Justice of earnings
Question wording
Survey-embedded experiment
German.Germany
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Additional Information: 
Open access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL.
Creative Commons License: 
cc-by Logo
Document Type: 
Article
Document Version: 
Published Version

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