Chapter 1: Justice and Affect: When Two Friends Meet

If I would ask you to reflect upon your day, most of you would probably recall, at least, one action, decision or incident that had to with justice. In fact, justice is a dominating theme in our daily lives and concerns about this issue go way back to the ancient moral philosophers like Plato and Aristotles (Rawls, 1971). Justice concerns arrive in different forms and can entail concerns about the manner in which decisions are made, how outcomes are allocated, and how one is treated in the process of making decisions and allocating outcomes (Bies, & Moag, 1986; Deutsch, 1975; Thibaut & Walker, 1975). All these social events influence our personal and professional lives to such an extent that it has motivated social scientists to examine in greater detail why we value justice so much. While engaging in this scientific enterprise, at an intuitive level it has become clear that justice and particularly instances of injustice move us in ways that we would not expect from a purely rational perspective alone. Thus, in order to understand how and why justice has the effects it has, it is necessary that we as scientists also explore how we feel about justice, and, more precisely, explore the degree to what extent justice is in the eye of the beholder and thus subject to affective influences.