Descriptive and Prescriptive Belief in a Just World
Abstract
The Justice Motive has traditionally been conceptualized as a homeostatic, prevention-focused motivation, but attempts to measure individual differences in the Justice Motive (i.e., the Belief in a Just World) have not treated it as one. The measurement of a motivation requires accounting for both the current state and the goal state, but traditional measurement techniques have relied solely on beliefs about how just the world currently is (i.e., the current state). This has resulted in two major issues in the literature. First is the assumption that everyone who reports believing in a just world has reached that belief because of the same motivation. The second issue is that measurements of the Belief in a Just World have demonstrated only a small relation with the Justice Motive. The present research was designed to address these issues by introducing a second, complementary scale called the Prescriptive Belief in a Just World Scale, which measures beliefs about how just the world should be (i.e., the goal state), to be used in conjunction with the traditional scale, which we now refer to as the Descriptive Belief in a Just World Scale. Across seven studies, we found evidence that the Descriptive and Prescriptive Belief in a Just World Scales are independent and that we can use them to detect significant differences in a number of justice-related variables, judgments of the injustice of specific events, and the willingness to engage in behaviours prototypical of a strong Justice Motive which would be undetectable without the inclusion of our second scale. Taken together, our results suggest that using the Descriptive and Prescriptive Belief in a Just World Scales concurrently allows us to better understand variation in the strength of the Justice Motive.