The Belief in a Just World by Melvin J. Lerner

Author:Melvin J. Lerner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer US, Boston, MA

For the most part, then, we had good empirical reasons to support our impressions that the experimental manipulations had the expected effect. With that in mind, we can now look at the measure of the main dependent variable, the amount of work subjects did for their supervisor in the second situation (Table 17).

Table 17Number of Envelopes Completed in Work Perioda

Study I

The analysis produced a significant interaction between the two independent variables. There were no main effects, and the only cells which are significantly different from one another in number of units produced are those with means of 14 and 19. In effect, we can say that those workers who had been rewarded in the previous situation were the ones who expended the most effort on behalf of their dependent supervisor, who had been payed very little during the first session. On the other hand, those subjects who been betrayed initially, or who had worked alone as controls, produced considerably more if their present supervisor had been previously highly rewarded, than if he had earned only 25 cents, presumably due to betrayal by his previous worker.

All of this is strange. To be sure, the behavior of the previously highly rewarded worker can be explained somewhat if one assumes that the effect of the high pay was to create the impression in the subjects that they were being overpaid, inequitably. And thus they were made more sensitive to issues of “equitable” or just treatment (Adams, 1965). But that is as far as we can go with that “theory.” And certainly, this pattern of findings is beyond that which anyone could generate plausibly from the assumptions associated with the “norm of social responsibility.” Even the latter more sophisticated version which incorporates some of the assumptions of reactance theory (Berkowitz, 1973) would fare little better.

The best hunch we could come up with to explain these findings went something like this. The rewarded subjects may have been exhibiting a noblesse oblige or good citizen response, or reflecting an overcompensation-induced guilt. Overall, they were the least surprising and least interesting to us. The fact that both the fail-betrayed and control subjects exhibited the same pattern of great effort for the previously highly paid, and minimal effort for the previously poorly paid, supervisor, seemed important. Is it possible that these subjects, regardless of their own immediately prior experiences, interpreted information about the supervisor’s prior earnings and fate as valid and compelling evidence concerning his personal merit as a supervisor? One bit of additional evidence tended to support this hunch. At the end of the second session, the subjects completed a second set of ratings. Only one of those produced significant differences among the conditions. “Would you want your partner from this task as a roommate?” The reactions to this completely hypothetical question were as follows:

Table 18Worker Question 9: Study I “Would You Want Partner from This Task as a Roommate?a

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