Justice Context and Changes in Fairness-Related Criteria Over Time

Research on distributive, procedural, and interactional justice has shown that individuals have strong preferences for specific fairness-related decision criteria (e.g., equity, etc.) but that the relative importance of these criteria varies as a function of social context. Students offered importance ratings of 21 justice criteria three times over a semester. Multilevel growth curve modeling showed that changes over the semester in factors of distributive justice importance were influenced by fairness perceptions of the instructor and self-interest (i.e., expected grades), but changes in factors of procedural and interactional justice importance were influenced only by fairness perceptions of the instructor. The analyses also supported the presence of procedural and interactional—but not distributive—justice contexts.