Third Party Justice:Punishment And Compensation And The Emotional Mechanism

Justice has always been the pursuit of human society. Justice can protect people’s reasonable income and make the society in rules. Justice has an important influence on people’s emotion, attitude and behavior. However, injustice still happens sometimes. Studies found that organizational injustice will increase victim’s negative emotional experience, and reduce the organizational identification and thus affect the performance and the intention to leave. In the organizational context, the impact of injustice is not only limited to the impact of the direct victims. Injustice will also have a certain impact on the observers who observed the event of injustice. Third party (the spectator) knows the unfair events through the indirect experience will also form an unfair judgment, and feel negative emotion and then intervene with the injustice. Therefore, the current article discusses the organizational justice based on the third party perspective, and explores the mechanism of the third party’s response to injustice.This study based on the deontic model. The deontic model points that third party facing an injustice event will generate moral anger and then predict the punishment behavior towards the offender (who does unfair event to others). Based on a series of studies, the researchers found that third parties would sacrifice their own interests in order to punish the offenders, even though they are not the victims of the incident. However, the study of third party punishment usually focus in the field of crime, but the injustice in the organizational context often inspire a variety of motivation and intervention, the typical intervention of third party are punishment and compensation. At present, the research of third party compensation is still in the initial stage, and the emotional mechanism needs to be further studied.In order to discuss the above problems, this paper carried out two studies using the behavioral experiment method and scenario method. With college students as the research sample, the current study explores third party’s interventions of injustice and emotional antecedents. The specific designs of the studies are as follows:Study 1 is a behavior experiment, using the resource allocation paradigm to manipulate the unfair distribution. With 54 college students as subjects, the study explores third party’s intervention of the distribution injustice. The participants can choose punishment, compensation, the combination of punishment and compensation, non-intervention freely. The results of the study showed that in distributive injustice situation, third party prefers compensation.53.70% of the subjects choose the combination of punishment and compensation; 40.74% of the subjects selected compensation; only 3.70% of subjects choose punishment and 1.85% subjects chose not to intervene. Third party’s empathy trait can significantly predict the compensation strength. Through the further analysis of the punishment and compensation amount, we found that what third party concerned is not the whole justice. Whether the punishment or the compensation, third party sacrificed their self-interests, the ultimate objective of the behavior is to restore the justice between the offender and the victim. So third party’s reaction to injustice is a kind of morality.It can be seen from the results of study 1, in the face of injustice, third party prefers compensation. The purpose of study 2 is to further explore the emotional mechanism of third party punishment and compensation. Considering the resource allocation paradigm involves rational calculation which will weaken the direct effect of emotion on behavior, it is not suitable for the discussion of the influence of emotion on behavior. Study 2 adopts the paradigm of situational experiment, and expands from distribution injustice to interpersonal injustice. According to Haidt’s moral emotion classification and the directivity of moral emotion, we divided the moral emotion into three classifications: moral outrage towards the violators, sympathy towards the victims, anxious towards third party self. The results found that moral outrage predicts third party’s punishment and compensation; sympathy forecast third party compensation. The relationship between anxious emotion with the two kinds behavior is not significant. This result further proves that third party justice is a kind of moral reaction independent of self-interests.At last we analysis and discuss the limitation and the future research.