The Research On The Influential Factors Of Distributional Fairness Judgment

Compared with the fairness based on the objective facts, the sense of fairness is more of a kind of psychological experience and subjective judgment, which is the judgment of the individual’s perception of fairness based on the actual conditions. In the field of judgment and decision making, The earliest research on fairness judgment began from Kahneman et al., they tested the relation between reference dependence which was the core concept of prospect theory and fairness judgment using the method of social survey. After this, scholars have made a lot of exploratory attempts based on their research, and accumulated a certain amount of research results. However, there is still a lack of targeted research in the field of distributional fairness judgment, so it is necessary to carry out a more detailed study. Therefore, this research mainly investigated the influential factors of distributional fairness judgment by adopting self-designed simulation scenarios.Based on two core concepts(reference dependence and loss aversion) of prospect theory in behavioral decision making, self-designed simulation scenarios focused on the influence of reference point and referent outcome on distributional fairness judgment. Study 1 employed experiment with 4 (reference point:average wage, minimum wage, maximum wage, no reference salary)×2 (referent outcome:advantageous inequality, disadvantageous inequality) between-subject design to exam the effect of reference point and referent outcome. The results of experiment1 suggested that the main effect of the reference point was significant, post hoc tests indicated that fairness judgment of no reference salary was significantly higher than that of the average wage and the minimum wage; the main effect of the referent outcome was significant, and the scores of the subjects in the advantageous inequality situation were significantly higher than those in the disadvantageous inequality situation; the interaction effect between the reference point and the referent outcome was significant, in the case of disadvantageous inequality, there were significant differences between the fairness judgment scores of the participants in the different reference points, the distributional fairness judgment scores of the subjects was from high to low:no reference salary, maximum reference salary, minimum reference salary, average reference salary, In the average, minimum and maximum wage scenarios, the fairness judgment scores of the subjects in the advantageous inequality situation was significantly higher than that of the disadvantageous inequality.Study 2 mainly explored the effect of characteristics of the information on distributional fairness judgment with 2 (project role:leader, member)×2 (procedural information:voice opportunity, no voice opportunity)×2 (outcome information:divide equally, divide unequally) between-subject design. The results showed that:the main effect of outcome information was significant, distributional fairness judgment scores of the subjects under the condition of bonus was divided equally was significantly higher than that under the condition of bonus was divided unequally; the interaction effect of project role and outcome information was significant, under the condition of the bonus was divided equally, distributional fairness judgment scores of project members were higher than the project leader; whether project leaders or project members, distributional fairness judgment scores of the subjects under the condition of bonus was divided equally was significantly higher than that under the condition of bonus was divided unequally.