The Justice Motive In Everyday Life

This book describes how a concern for justice affects people's judgements and behaviours.

This book contains essays in honour of Melvin J. Lerner, a pioneer in the psychological study of justice. The contributors to this volume are internationally renowned scholars from psychology, business, and law. They examine the role of justice motivation in a wide variety of contexts, including workplace violence, affirmative action programs, helping or harming innocent victims and how people react to their own fate. Contributors explore fundamental issues such as whether people's interest in justice is motivated by self-interest or a genuine concern for the welfare of others, when and why people feel a need to punish transgressors, how a concern for justice emerges during the development of societies and individuals, and the relation of justice motivation to moral motivation. How an understanding of justice motivation can contribute to the amelioration of major social problems is also examined.

Beginning with the assumption that a justice motive exists, the author posits that belief in a just world influences the behavior of most people most of the time. This is true for all people of all ages and in all areas of life, for those struggling with their daily tasks as well as for those coping with a critical life event. An individual's belief in a just world is a necessary condition for a person's sense of fairness and mediates its adaptive effect on mental health.

This book provides a unique overview of the development of justice-related beliefs in different socialization contexts, and also of the role this plays in protecting mental health and promoting career development for adolescents and young adults. A range of European contributors bridge the conceptual gap between social and developmental psychological perspectives and use a number of original case-studies. This book provides new insights for justice psychology and adds new and important perspectives to studies on youth development.

The Encyclopedia of Leadership brings together for the first time everything that is known and truly matters about leadership as part of the human experience. Developed by the award-winning editorial team at Berkshire Publishing Group, the Encyclopedia includes hundreds of articles, written by 280 leading scholars and experts from 17 countries, exploring leadership theories and leadership practice. Entries and sidebars show leadership in action - in corporations and state houses, schools, churches, small businesses, and nonprofit organizations.

This volume was conceived out of the concern with what the imminent future holds for the "have" countries ... those societies, such as the United States, which are based on complex technology and a high level of energy consumption. Even the most sanguine projection includes as base minimum relatively rapid and radical change in all aspects of the society, reflecting adaptation or reactions to demands created by poten tial threat to the technological base, sources of energy, to the life-support system itself. Whatever the source of these threats-whether they are the result of politically endogeneous or exogeneous forces-they will elicit changes in our social institutions; changes resulting not only from attempts to adapt but also from unintended consequences of failures to adapt. One reasonable assumption is that whatever the future holds for us, we would prefer to live in a world of minimal suffering with the greatest opportunity for fulfilling the human potential. The question then becomes one of how we can provide for these goals in that scenario for the imminent future ... a world of threat, change, need to adapt, diminishing access to that which has been familiar, comfortable, needed.

This study introduces a new perspective on Lincoln and the Civil War through an examination of his declaration of our national values and the subsequent interpretation of those values by families during the war. This volume is a completely new approach to Civil War history. Historians rightly regard Abraham Lincoln as a moral exemplar, a president who gave new life to the national values that defined America. While some previous studies attest to Lincoln's identification with family virtues, this is the first to link Lincoln's personal biography with actual histories of families at war. It analyzes the relationship that existed between Lincoln and these families and assesses the moral struggles that validated the families' decision for or against the conflict. Written to be accessible to students and the general reader alike, the book examines Lincoln's presidency as measured against the stories of families, North and South, that struggled with his definition of Union virtues. It looks at Lincoln's compelling case for democratic values—among them, justice, patriotism, honor, and commitment—first stated in his 1861 speech before Independence Hall. The work also uses case studies to demonstrate how virtue, as practiced in families, illuminated, contested, adapted, and even transformed his concept, giving new meaning to the "virtues of war."

The American dream of equal opportunity is in peril. America's economic inequality is shocking, poverty threatens to become a heritable condition, and our healthcare system is crumbling despite ever increasing costs. In this thought-provoking book, Edward D. Kleinbard demonstrates how the failure to acknowledge the force of brute luck in our material lives exacerbates these crises leading to warped policy choices that impede genuine equality of opportunity for many Americans. What's Luck Got to Do with It? combines insights from economics, philosophy, and social psychology to argue for government's proper role in addressing the inequity of brute luck. Kleinbard shows how well-designed public investment can blunt the worst effects of existential bad luck that private insurance cannot reach and mitigate inequality by sharing the costs across the entire risk pool, which is to say, all of us. The benefits, as Kleinbard shares in a wealth of data, are economic as well as social a more inclusive economy, higher national income, and greater life satisfaction for millions of Americans. Like it or not, our lives and opportunities are determined largely by luck. Kleinbard shows that while we can't undo every instance of misfortune, we can offer a path to not just a fairer America, but greater economic growth, more broadly shared.