The links among social inequality, economic inequality, and health have long been of interest to social scientists, but causal links are difficult to investigate empirically. In particular, studies examining the impact of social status on one's own health may overlook important effects of inequality on the health of populations as a whole occurring due to negative externalities of social forces. A recent literature on caste, sanitation, and child net nutrition provides an example of one social context where social inequality makes an entire population less healthy. This paper presents new observational analysis of the India Human Development Survey that provides descriptive evidence of this mechanism. We show that, on average, children in rural India are shorter if they live in villages where more people report practicing untouchability-meaning that they enforce caste hierarchies in their interactions with people from the lowest castes. This association is explained by the association between casteism and the prevalence of rural open defecation.

Investigations of racial bias have emphasized stereotypes and other beliefs as central explanatory mechanisms and as legitimating discrimination. In recent theory and research, emotional prejudices have emerged as another, more direct predictor of discrimination. A new comprehensive meta-analysis of 57 racial attitude-discrimination studies finds a moderate relationship between overall attitudes and discrimination. Emotional prejudices are twices as closely related to racial discrimination as stereotypes and beliefs are. Moreover, emotional prejudices are closely related to both observed and self-reported discrimination, whereas stereotypes and beliefs are related only to self-reported discrimination. Implications for justifying discrimination are discussed.

This study describes the development of two versions of a Health Care Justice Inventory (HCJI). One version focuses on patients' interactions with their providers (HCJI-P) and the other focuses on patients' interactions with the representatives of their health plans (HCJI-HP). Each version of the HCJI assesses patients' appraisals of their interactions (with either their Provider or representatives of their Health Plan) along three common dimensions of procedural justice: Trust, Impartiality, and Participation. Both the Provider and Health Plan scales assess indices that are relatively independent of patients' demographic characteristics. In addition, patients' appraisals of their interactions with their provider were only moderately related to their appraisals of their interactions with representatives of their health plan, indicating that the Provider and Health Plan scales tap distinct aspects of patients' overall experience with the health care system. Overall, procedural justice dimensions were significantly related to patient satisfaction in both the Provider and the Health Plan contexts. As predicted, procedural justice factors were more strongly tied to patient satisfaction in the provider than in the Health Plan context, and health care decisions based on distributive justice principles of Need (rather than Equity or Equality) were most closely tied to patient satisfaction in both contexts.

Considerable research has supported the notion that procedural justice is important to individuals independent of outcome considerations. Tyler and his associates (Lind and Tyler, 1988; Lind and Earley 1992; Tyler, 1989) proposed that this is so because procedural justice serves a group value function. In the present research, we explore aspects of this group value formulation in a real life health care context. Specifically, we assessed the relationship between individuals' appraisals of procedural justice following health care treatment decisions as well ass (i) expectations for different consequences to self; (ii) estimates of how they were viewed by the health care authorities; (iii) attributions about the reasons for their treatment; and (iv) ratings of emotional reactions. Results confirmed many components of the relational, group value model of procedural justice (Lind and Tyler, 1988; Lind and Earley, 1992; Tyler, 1989). Specifically, respondents who felt that they had been treated fairly expected that their status and their relationship with the health care decision maker and others in their health care group would improve; perceived that the health care decision maker would rate them positively on a variety of personality dimensions; felt that the health care decision maker's interactions with them revealed quite a lot about the decision-maker's personality characteristics; and indicated increased levels of pride and pleasure as well as lower levels of anger as a result of their treatment. Results were discussed from several frameworks including Markus and Kitayama's (1991) concept of independent and the interdependent self.

Conspiracy theories are widespread and have a profound impact on society. The present contribution proposes that conspiracy theories are explanatory narratives that necessarily contain justice judgments, as they include attributions of blame and accusations of unethical or criminal conduct. Conspiratorial narratives also are mental simulations, however, and may elicit genuine feelings of injustice also without evidence of actual malpractice. Indeed, conspiracy theories sometimes describe unfair events that are unlikely to have occurred, unethical authorities that might not actually exist, and so on. Here I propose two complementary processes that stimulate belief in evidence-free conspiracy theories: (1) Existential threats instigate biased mental processing and motivated reasoning, that jointly promote an alternative perception of reality; and (2) group allegiances shape how people perceive, interpret, and remember facts to highlight the immoral qualities of competing outgroups. Due to these processes, conspiracy theories elicit a set of distinct reactions such as poor health choices and rejection of science. Moreover, evidence-free conspiracy theories require interventions beyond traditional approaches to install justice principles, such as debunking falsehoods and reducing polarized intergroup distinctions. I conclude that the scientific study of conspiracy theories is part of, and has a unique place in, social justice research.

Inheritance represents a conflict between the individual and society. On one hand, the intergenerational transmission of resources favors the reproduction of privilege. On the other hand, contemporary individualization processes prioritize individual achievement. This paper addresses this conflict through a sociological approach by analyzing perceptions of inheritance taxation based on 32 in-depth interviews with members of the economic elite in Chile. Findings show that the principle of individual freedom in decisions regarding resource use prevails over the redistributive function that controls inheritance and favors personal attainment. In addition, a negative view of inheritance prevails, which is sustained by three major repertoires of evaluation emphasizing its inefficiency, ineffectiveness, economic inconvenience, and lack of foundation, as its purpose or utility is unknown. This last argument is surprising because it does not reject this tax for its design or application; rather, it confronts some crucial ideas with which it is usually linked, namely opportunity levelling at the beginning of a new generation and redistribution of privilege.

Germany has one of the highest levels of wealth concentration of any Western capitalist country. Research on the legitimization of economic inequality highlights that wealth elites tend to stress meritocratic arguments for legitimizing elite positions and wealth accumulation. However, whether this is also the case for wealthy business owners and how the media tends to portray those remains largely unknown. Drawing on a unique sample of 899 press articles from eight different media outlets between 2014 and 2018, we find a rather generous media debate. Based on descriptive evidence and a latent class analysis, we identify six latent frames illustrating how wealthy business owners are portrayed in the press. We show that the sources of wealth (inheritance, investment, entrepreneurship) are often used to highlight these owners' deep economic relevance to the German economy, while the use of wealth is predominantly framed as a mean for profit-seeking. For wealthy business owners, moral evaluation of personal conduct is less present in the media and, when it is present, is rarely negative. Our study is the first analysis of press coverage of the wealthiest German business owners indicating a legitimizing media debate of high wealth concentration in an advanced capitalist society.

In most contemporary societies, people underestimate the extent of economic inequality, resulting in lower support for taxation and redistribution than might be expressed by better informed citizens. We still know little, however, about how understandings of inequality arise, and therefore about where perceptions and misperceptions of it might come from. This methodological article takes one step toward filling this gap by developing a research design-a blueprint-to study how people's understandings of wealth and income inequality develop through social interaction. Our approach combines insights from recent scholarship highlighting the socially situated character of inequality beliefs with those of survey experimental work testing how information about inequality changes people's understandings of it. Specifically, we propose to use deliberative focus groups to approximate the interactional contexts in which individuals process information and form beliefs in social life. Leveraging an experimental methodology, our design then varies the social makeup of deliberative groups, as well as the information about inequality we share with participants, to explore how different types of social environments and information shape people's understandings of economic inequality. This should let us test, in particular, whether the low socioeconomic diversity of people's discussion and interaction networks relates to their tendency to underestimate inequality, and whether beliefs about opportunity explain people's lack of appetite for redistributive policies. In this exploratory article we motivate our methodological apparatus and describe its key features, before reflecting on the findings from a proof-of-concept study conducted in London in the fall of 2019.

All healthcare systems operate with limited resources and therefore need to set priorities for allocating resources across a population. Trade-offs between maximising health and promoting health equity are inevitable in this process. In this paper, we use the UK's National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) as an example to examine how efforts to promote healthcare innovation in the priority-setting process can complicate these trade-offs. Drawing on NICE guidance, health technology assessment reports and relevant policy documents, we analyse under what conditions NICE recommends the National Health Service fund technologies of an "innovative nature", even when these technologies do not satisfy NICE's cost-effectiveness criteria. Our findings fail to assuage pre-existing concerns that NICE's approach to appraising innovative technologies curtails its goals to promote health and health equity. They also reveal a lack of transparency and accountability regarding NICE's treatment of innovative technologies, as well as raising additional concerns about equity. We conclude that further research needs to evaluate how NICE can promote health and health equity alongside healthcare innovation and draw some general lessons for healthcare priority-setting bodies like NICE.

The emotional costs of the COVID-19 pandemic have raised concerns among clinicians and scholars. The goal of the current study was to test whether or not neuroticism, conscientiousness, and personal belief in a just world are associated with depression during the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, the contribution of neuroticism and conscientiousness was assessed over and above demographic variables and COVID-19 perceptions, and the unique contribution of personal belief in a just world was evaluated beyond all the other study variables. Samples were collected in three different countries-Israel ( = 917), Germany ( = 213), and India ( = 160). Online self-report questionnaires were utilized to measure age, gender, COVID-19 perceptions (probability, severity, and self-efficacy), neuroticism, conscientiousness, personal belief in a just world, and depression. The findings indicated that, across the three countries, neuroticism was positively associated with depression (correlations ranging from .24 to .44), and conscientiousness and personal belief in a just world were negatively associated with depression (correlations ranging from - .31 to - .21, and from - .35 to - .23, respectively). Moreover, neuroticism and conscientiousness explained unique variance over and above demographic variables and COVID-19 perceptions (except conscientiousness in India), and the effect of personal belief in a just world on depression was significant beyond the effects of all other study variables. These findings support the role of personality in explaining depression regardless of situational characteristics and stress the role of just world beliefs as protective factors against negative emotions.

People value being paid appropriately for their work-but national surveys indicate that many working adults report a discrepancy between what they actually earn and what they think they should justly earn. This evidence provides an impetus for examining the factors that shape workers' justice perceptions of earnings. The present study elaborates on two key distributive justice principles-equity and need-that guide people's ideas about their just reward. We ask: How do contemporary workers experience and understand the nature of work effort and need? We employ a mixed methods research design to answer this question. First, we analyze focus group interviews among workers in Toronto, Ontario ( = 22), and generate two novel hypotheses about the factors that shape workers' expectation for greater rewards: "downloaded" and "sideloaded" extra work that induce feelings of overwork, and rising cost of living and the associated financial strain. Second, drawing upon focus group narratives, we operationalize these concepts and test our hypotheses with a 2019 nationally representative sample of Canadian workers ( = 2,111). The results show that downloaded and sideloaded extra work shape greater reward expectations partly through the sense of overload, and rising cost of living and the associated financial strain also shape reward expectations. Furthermore, financial strain amplifies the link between extra work and greater reward expectations. We situate these findings within a broader discussion of the nature of effort and need among contemporary workers and its implications for justice perceptions.

A vast literature documents that wealth inequality has risen throughout advanced democracies, especially the accumulation of wealth among the rich. Yet, instead of increasing wealth redistribution, governments have done the seemingly opposite. Key to understanding why democratic governments do not increase wealth redistribution in times of rising inequalities is to shed light on the public's preferences. In this paper, we map the public's redistributive preferences in fourteen countries based on new survey data. We show that traditional socioeconomic cleavages in preferences for wealth redistribution are undermined by diverging mobility expectations. People who expect to climb up the wealth distribution, mostly lower wealth groups, are less supportive of redistribution than people with high stakes of major wealth losses, mainly upper wealth groups. We show that future expectations among the rich and the poor have a highly moderating role for the class conflict over wealth redistribution. Moreover, the middle class, the decisive group in democracies, is highly unresponsive to future prospects. The findings suggest that the middle class does not have much to lose or to win, and therefore, wealth redistribution is of low salience among this group.

This study investigated whether people's personal belief in a just world (BJW) is linked to their willingness to physically distance themselves from others during the COVID-19 pandemic. Past research found personal BJW to be positively related to prosocial behavior, justice striving, and lower risk perceptions. If social distancing reflects a concern for others, high personal BJW should predict increased interest in social distancing. If social distancing reflects a concern for one's personal risk, high personal BJW should predict decreased interest in social distancing. Results of a pre-registered internet-based study from Germany ( = 361) indicated that the higher people's personal BJW, the more they generally practiced social distancing. This association still occurred when controlling for empathy, another significant predictor of social distancing. There were no mediation effects of empathy and risk perception. The findings extend knowledge on the correlates of social distancing in the COVID-19 pandemic which could be used to increase compliance among citizens.

This article disentangles and explores some commonly made assumptions about . Based on the conceptual framework of the multiprinciple approach of justice, it presents the results of an in-depth analysis of (e)valuation patterns of distributive justice in Cuban state-socialism. The analysis mainly focuses on ideational conceptions of distributive justice , but it also accounts for distribution outcomes and resulting (in)equalities . The results of the comparative case study of the Cuban framework of institutions and political leaders' views in two periods of time, the early 1960s and the 2010s, point to (e)valuation patterns that are generally labelled as , such as the allocation rules of outcome equality and (non-functional) needs. However, contrary to common assumptions about egalitarian state-socialist ideologies, the results also point to several other patterns including equity rules as well as functional and productivist allocation rules. I argue that many of these (e)valuation patterns, in their connection to the discursive storyline of the Cuban are indeed compatible with

The concentration of wealth is a key component of the rise in economic inequality at the beginning of the twenty-first century. While the abolition of taxes on private wealth during the 1990s and 2000s is recognized as an important institutional driver behind this development, comparatively little is known about the justification of tax cuts for the wealthy in advanced democracies. This paper investigates how the abolishment of the personal net wealth tax in Germany, a country with high levels of wealth inequality, has been debated and justified in parliament over a period of 20 years. Using a mixed methods approach that combines computational social science methods and a qualitative analysis, we examine how Germany's two major parties, the Christian Democrats (CDU) and the Social Democrats (SPD), have variously construed the meaning and purpose of the wealth tax and justified their support for or opposition to it. While the Social Democrats debate the wealth tax primarily from a social justice perspective, the Christian Democrats rely on an efficiency frame that invokes biological metaphors, enabling them to narrate the wealth tax as a threat to the social body. Paradoxically, then, by arguing that the tax is "poison to the economy", conservative discourse succeeds in linking opposition to the wealth tax to a principle of social unity. On these grounds, we suggest that future research should scrutinize how the interrelation between political discourse and institutional architectures has facilitated the rise of wealth inequality in recent decades.

This paper seeks to understand the association between ratees' relational justice perceptions and their feedback acceptance, both directly and through leader-member exchange (LMX). The paper also examines the moderated mediation effect of supervisory trust. The paper presents the findings of two studies. Study 1 utilized two data sets collected through an online survey from 280 part-time students working full-time (Sample 1) and 292 working professionals (Sample 2) in Pakistan. Study 2 utilized data collected from  = 167 students recruited for a scenario-based experiment that manipulated whether a manager was fair or unfair. Results revealed that relational justice positively predicted feedback acceptance in Studies 1 and 2. LMX positively mediated the above-mentioned relationship in both studies. As expected, supervisory trust negatively moderated the relational justice-feedback acceptance relationship in Study 2. The present study contributes to performance management theory and practice by illuminating that raters can stimulate performance partnership by employing a relational justice approach that increases the likelihood that employees accept performance feedback.

Societies are confronted with the dilemma that need satisfaction requires transparent individual needs. We study the effect of information about others' needs on the distribution of a joint endowment in a three-player network exchange game in a laboratory experiment. Need levels are exogenously given and either transparent (known to all three network members) or opaque (only known to the players themselves). The three players negotiate in dyads until two players agree on a distribution. We expect that the transparency of need thresholds raises need satisfaction but lowers equality. The results suggest that the members of the dyad who agree on the distribution can satisfy their own need thresholds even when information about thresholds is opaque. The effect of transparency on the remaining network member is antithetical: while transparency increases the rate of need satisfaction, it decreases the average share of allocations when needs are low. In the opaque condition, allocated shares are larger, but need satisfaction is lower. This reveals the ambivalent distributive effects of transparent need thresholds: Transparency helps those with the highest need thresholds, but it can hurt those with lower need thresholds, and it barely affects the ones with the most influence on the decision.