آیا فضیلت پاداش خود را دارد؟ تصمیم گیری های خود-قربانی به خاطر عدالت

We investigate the ways in which concern for fairness influences decision-making. We use a paradigm previously shown to illustrate circumstances under which a decision maker sacrifices some of his or her own potential for financial gain to punish or reward someone who has demonstrated a prior intent to be either unfair or fair to another person. By ruling out alternative hypotheses related to the original finding, we obtain evidence that “virtue is its own reward”: Decision makers make self-sacrificing allocations, despite the absence of short- or long-term benefits for doing so. Extending the generality of this effect, we also identify circumstances under which the desire for virtuous fairness produces decisions that are not self-sacrificial and do reward someone whose motives seemingly include a willingness to exploit others. These special circumstances apparently indicate the decision maker's belief that “two wrongs don't make a right.” Thus, these studies show that the fairness motive and moral concerns can influence decisions that have economic impact. We extend the range of effects in other studies to include condemnation of interactional injustice and we discuss implications of the overall set of studies in terms of three new foci for attention: A focus on the perpetrator, a focus on the victim, and a focus on the offensiveness of the act itself.

Moral judgment and the condemnation of others, including fictional others and others who have not harmed the self, is a universal and essential feature of human social life (Rozin, Lowery, Imada, & Haidt, 1999, p. 574). People undertake to punish others when they have no concrete or immediate “interest” in doing so—when they have nothing directly to gain by punishing, and there may be some risk or cost in doing so (Fiske, 1991a, p. 192). Are humans inevitably selfish? Can all human behaviors be reduced to self-interest? As the opening quotations suggest, we think not. They indicate that people sometimes seek to punish the moral transgressions of others—even those with whom they have no relationship—not only without any instrumental self-benefit but also (at times) despite burdens imposed. Violations of fairness norms fit that description, but, as we will show, existing organizational justice literature derives fairness-oriented reactions by assuming universal self-interest. We propose that such reactions reflect the presence of endogenous “deontic emotions” (from the Greek root deon for obligation or duty)—emotions elicited by perceiving the transgression itself, just as aesthetic emotions (e.g., the enjoyment elicited by viewing a dramatic sunset) are endogenous and intrinsic to the experience itself. The intrinsic, endogenous nature of such reactions is expressed in a common colloquial expression regarding moralistic reactions: “Virtue is its own reward.” 1 To preclude self-interest, our research has respondents function as observers of a moral transgression between two parties with whom they have no relationship (i.e., as disinterested third parties in the sense of the opening quote from Fiske, 1991a). Our respondents never know the identity of either of the other two parties, the victim or the perpetrator. Respondents who express antipathy toward the perpetrator of a transgression or who punish that perpetrator at the cost of their own self-interests therefore act consistently with the opening quotes from theorists who hypothesized the existence of such behavior. In our final discussion, we speculate about possible links between our results and emergent theories on “deonance” (Folger, 2001; see also Cropanzano, Byrne, Bobocel, & Rupp, Byrne et al., 20012001), which aim to explain moral emotions and reactions to others' actions as morally creditable or blameworthy (see also the attribution-of-blame based Fairness Theory of accountability, Folger and Cropanzano, 1998 and Folger and Cropanzano, 2001). Our next section contextualizes the deontic approach by distinguishing it from two others.

We conclude by first reviewing how these studies rule out alternative hypotheses and thus support a deontic (non-self-interested) perspective. We also address the self-interest of impression management, including managing one's own impressions of oneself toward oneself. 8.1. Reviewing the evidence An author of the Kahneman et al. (1986) study described it as showing that participants “sacrifice money to punish an Allocator who behaved unfairly to someone else ” ( Thaler, 1992, p. 24, emphasis in original). That is, their study focused on third-party observers rather than the victims of unfairness themselves. Before moving on to a further commentary about our own investigations, however, we must add two qualifications to Thaler's description. First, the reference to an “Allocator who behaved unfairly” mischaracterizes an important feature of the original study: That allocator (“U” for uneven, a person indicating a preference for an $18–$2 division) behaved unfairly in a more indirect manner than has most often been studied in the literature on organizational justice. The unfair “behavior” was only the indication of an intention (a preference for unfairness) rather than the infliction of actual harm, which makes the punishment of such unfairness—especially when made self-sacrificially—even more dramatic than in the usual studies of organizational justice. We investigated the role of intent as a specific focus in Study 4. Second, we must qualify the characterization of the reaction as the willingness to “sacrifice money to punish” intended unfairness. In the original Kahneman et al. study, those who sacrificially punished intended unfairness also simultaneously rewarded intended fairness—the confound addressed in our first two studies. The results of our attempt to disentangle punishment and reward in Study 1 confirmed Hypothesis 1a (predicting that participants would more often reward an Even partner sacrificially than an Uneven partner sacrificially) significantly, whereas the means for Hypothesis 1b (predicting that participants would be more likely to punish an Uneven partner sacrificially than an Even partner sacrificially) were in the right direction but did not reach conventional levels of significance. The latter tendency reflected a marked overall unwillingness to punish anyone in the two-person (Partner Knowledge) conditions we created as a special decomposition of the original Kahneman et al. paradigm. This interpretation is also consistent with the unexpected main effect for Payout in Study 1, such that an average of 83% of our respondents chose to reward sacrificially and only 10% chose to punish sacrificially. The dramatically reduced punishment in the two-person design led to the Study 2 logic—that we would have to eliminate a “two wrongs don't make a right” conflict between two moral motives. Study 2 used three conditions: (a) a replication condition from Study 1 of the two-party opportunity to punish an Uneven partner; (b) a replication condition from the KKT design of a three-party opportunity to punish Uneven and reward Even simultaneously; and (c) a new three-party condition, involving Uneven and someone allegedly from a prior experiment unrelated to allocations (revealing nothing about that person's intentions). The results confirmed our prediction. Again, no punishment of Uneven occurred in the two-party condition, which differed significantly from punishment that was equally high, regardless of whether the three-party condition contained an unrelated or Even partner. These results are the first in the KKT tradition to reveal self-sacrificial punishment of intended injustice unconfounded with a chance to reward justice. We turned next to generalizing this core finding in Studies 3 and 4. Study 3 extended that finding to the realm of punishing interactional injustice and also provided a further opportunity to remove that punishment from other effects achievable simultaneously. Prior to Study 3, all three-party variations on the Kahneman et al. paradigm linked the $6-for-oneself option not only with $6 for Uneven but also with $0 for someone else (e.g., in Study 2, either Even or a person from an unrelated experiment). The unrelated partner in Study 2 was not rewarded for fairness by the choice of the self-sacrificial option, but choosing it did prevent the unrelated partner from being punished by the $0 allocation that would have resulted from choosing the $6-for-onself option instead. One of the unique contributions of Study 3 therefore was the change that substituted $6 (rather than $0) for the unrelated partner in the $6-for-oneself option. Another contribution was the evidence for punishing an interactional injustice, thereby generalizing the original paradigm beyond circumstances in which the dependent variable—allocations of outcomes—remained in the same justice domain as that of the (prior) intended unfairness. Study 4 extended further generalizability in terms of both the circumstances of the prior unfairness and the dependent variable. Rather than focusing exclusively on a dichotomous measure of punishment allocations (which of two options chosen), we altered dependent measurement to tap a broader construct regarding the condemnation of misconduct (its offensiveness rated on continuous measurement scales). Study 4 also included manipulations of both group identification and intent. Whereas we had assumed a high level of intent held constant in the first three studies, its manipulation and significant effects in Study 4 provided confirming evidence to support that assumption and to demonstrate the important role of perpetrator motives more generally. Study 4 did not find effects related to the manipulation of group identification, but further exploration regarding boundary conditions for its impact might be worthwhile. Taken together, the results of these four studies cast doubt on the reasoning that self-interest, either material or social, is the sole, or even prime, motivator for people to attend to issues of fairness. First, in studies 1–3, a significant number of participants were willing to sacrifice their material self-interest in reaction to unfairness, even though there were no short- or long-term material benefits for doing so. We chose the Kahneman et al. paradigm as our starting point precisely because it provides such a severe challenge to the view of humans as maximizers of material outcomes. Its effects, especially in the expanded range revealed by our variations on that paradigm, also challenge a host of other conventional theories. Punishing unfairness in these studies does not reflect an equity-restoration response (cf. Adams, 1965), for example, because the punished person never actually created an inequity. Second, social self-interest, or group identification, also does not seem to explain these results. Note the role of the person with unfair intent in the original Kahneman et al. paradigm as well as in our initial extensions of it (Study 1 and Study 2). That other person's exact identity was unclear; in our versions, for example, s/he was allegedly a student in some other class who participated in a prior experiment. The intended unfairness was in that person trying to keep $18 out of $20 for him- or herself. Why would that threaten respondents' self-identity? They surely would not see that person's unfair intentions as an effort to exclude them from membership in a group important to their self-identities. True, self-identity based on acceptance by a group was developed as an explanation for violations of procedural justice rather than the distributive violations reflected by the punished person's unfair intentions. The evidence inconsistent with material self-interest as a motive, however, also runs counter to the only other explanation yet proposed in cases where material self-interest has failed to account for obtained findings! We also varied the identity of the unfair person both between and within studies. We can see no indication that this identity mattered to our respondents. In the first two studies, for example, the unfair person was another student—and perhaps it might be argued that students were willing to punish unfair intentions because the punished person had attempted to deprive a fellow student. Study 3 therefore created a situation psychologically removed from our undergraduates' close identification (i.e., full-time employees at an unnamed organization in a distant city). Despite some degree of identity-based remoteness, that study still produced a substantial indication of the desire to hold the perpetrator accountable for acts of interactional injustice. Similarly, Study 4 found condemnation of intentional unfairness (significantly stronger than when intent was absent), despite a context with no self-identity implications from group membership—namely when interactional injustice affected international gymnasts. We think it strains credulity to explain those negative reactions as based on a desire to feel accepted into the community of gymnasts, or to assume that our respondents would base self-identity on membership in that particular group. Note that we also failed to find an effect of group identification in Study 4, despite significant manipulation-check evidence for the impact of that independent variable. Null effects can be difficult to interpret, however, and we certainly would not be surprised to find the intensity of reactions varying as a function of empathy-based identification in other studies (e.g., caring more about what happened to a friend than to an enemy). Our studies open the door to a search for motives that go beyond both material self-interest and self-identity based on group membership. Although we do not claim that these investigations yield a proof for the existence of other motives or definitive clarification of their nature, we hope others will find this search worthwhile in light of the apparent inapplicability of motives addressed in the prior justice literature. In particular, we suggest discounting self-interest, either material or social, as the only explanation for the importance of justice. Is it possible, however, that we have just found another guise for self-interest? Following Greenberg (2001), Colquitt and Greenberg (2001) subsume all three views—not just the material and relational-identity but also the deontic—under self-interest. Greenberg (2001) argued that some roots of selfishness could still be the underlying motive, even when people seem to be acting deontically on principle (called “ostensibly moral motives for behaving fairly,” p. 214). For example, virtuous-appearing deeds might simply reflect actions taken by people who want to “protect their self-images or to avoid feelings of guilt” (Colquitt & Greenberg, 2001, p. 221). We disagree. Holley (1999) is one of the many philosophers showing cogently that self-interest (called egoism in philosophy) as a universal explanation for all behavior becomes a definitional tautology incapable of disproof: “If all else fails, there is a strategy used by advocates of universal egoism to make their case airtight against any counterexamples. It involves claiming that a person must be motivated by self-interested desires because what moves her to act is always her own desires” (p. 42). In effect, this claim says “what I mean by a self-interested desire is simply any desire of the person who performs an action” (p. 42). The vacuous circularity in this tautological definition is clear: “In that case, the egoist has given us a way to claim that egoism is true, but the cost of defending the thesis in this way is to render it trivial” (p. 42). 5 8.2. Beyond self-interest: Quo vadis? If self-interest does not account for our results—if virtue really is its own reward—what is the next step? We do not pretend to answer that question but instead point in three directions other than concerns that focus exclusively on the self: Toward other people, toward the offender, and toward the moral precept that the offender violates. The first of those future directions, pointed toward other people, suggests focusing on victim's characteristics rather than exclusively on consequences affecting the self directly. Simply put, this affirms common sense: People sometimes experience outrage about an offense, even when it affects others with whom they have very little direct affiliation (e.g., a heterosexual's outrage about unfairness toward homosexuals or the offensiveness of genocide that does not threaten one's own ethnic group). The second suggested direction—attention focused on the offender rather than focused exclusively on the self—is more novel than the first and more unique than it might seem if viewed superficially. We argued against self-identity interpretations based on group inclusion or acceptance, but we do acknowledge that failing to condemn injustice could threaten a person's self-identity, which some might see as a nuance rather than a meaningful difference. Consider, however, the difference between observing someone's intended mistreatment of another person and asking the following two kinds of questions: (a) “What kind of person does that make me?” (e.g., in contemplation of doing nothing) versus (b) “What kind of person does that make you?” (e.g., referring to the perpetrator of offensive misconduct). We argue even more generally that responses to injustice may be driven by answers to perpetrator-focused questions such as, “Who does she think she is?” and “What does that act of injustice say about him?” in addition to the current emphasis on self-as-victim questions such as, “Am I a valued and respected member of this group?” and “How well will my long-term economic interests be served by this group?” Past theorizing and research on reactions to injustice typically have put the self in the victim position, whereas we call for treating those perspectives differently as a way to opening up new investigation arenas. We think that even a shift of attention to others as victims will fall short of providing a comprehensive perspective on justice unless the role of perpetrators also gets special attention. The Study 4 manipulation of perceived intent illustrates a perpetrator focus. We think a third future direction may have the most innovative implications—in part because it is the least explored. In abstract terms, we had referred earlier to a new direction pointing “toward the moral precept that the offender violates.” Concrete examples include sacrilegious graffiti or the mutilation of dead bodies; or imagine a corporate entity that buys the Grand Canyon and converts it to an amusement park. All that we are saying is that certain actions seem horrific in and of themselves, and the capacity for moral outrage about such actions might transcend the specifics about the offender, the victim, and the group-based grounds for our own self-identity. Lest we seem to have traveled too far from the domain of organizational justice, we end on an applied note about implications for organizations. Consider a litigious society in which insurance companies and large conglomerates become the targets for law suits including class actions. If found guilty in U.S. courts, such firms are subject to payment for two types of damages: Compensatory and punitive. Compensatory damages provide payments to victims; punitive damages constitute an independent judgment about the offensiveness of the act itself (and also serve purposes such as expressing moral outrage over injury to the innocent). By pursuing research directions such as those illustrated by the current investigations and our speculative theoretical commentary, we think organizational scholars in the future can have much more to say about the determinants of such judgments than can be said based on the contemporary literature. If nothing else, we think our call for attention to virtue-as-reward effects regarding reactions to unfairness might help shed new light on citizen reactions to corporate conduct and perceived misconduct. We have shown that people sometimes sacrifice financial well-being to condemn (even if only privately) wrongful intent. The same people who give up a dollar in the laboratory will one day, if not already, own stocks—and might refrain from investing in a company on moral grounds, even if it offered a more attractive investment opportunity than that investor's other options.