What people regard as unjust: Types and structures of everyday experiences of injustice

Abstract

Abstract The present research was designed to identify types of events in everyday life that people regard as unjust and to find a meaningful structural representation of these types of events. Two hundred and eighty descriptions of unjust events were collected from various student samples using different methodologies. Interestingly, a considerable proportion of the injustices which were reported did not concern distributional or procedural issues in the narrow sense but referred to the manner in which people were treated in interpersonal interactions and encounters. An intuitive classification of the descriptions by two experts led to 22 different types of unjust events. Subsequently, a sample of 84 descriptions was selected and sorted by naive subjects into similar groupings. The grouping data were then subjected to cluster and multidimensional scaling analyses. A nineteen‐cluster solution reproduced the intuitively defined main types of unjust events very well. An eight‐cluster solution, which provided the most meaningful higher level grouping, and the MDS results indicated that a meaningful structural representation of types of injustices has to consider the particular content of unjust events as well as the social setting where they occur. With regard to the latter aspect, injustices in task‐oriented relationships of unequal power and impersonal short‐term encounters are distinguished from injustices occurring in personal, long‐term, social‐emotional relationships of equal power.