Date of Award

1-1-2023

Language

English

Document Type

Master's Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

College/School/Department

Department of Psychology

Content Description

1 online resource (iv, 61 pages) : illustrations (some color)

Dissertation/Thesis Chair

Sylvia G. Roch

Committee Members

Dev K. Dalal

Keywords

Affect, Counterfactual Thinking, Fairness Theory, Justice, Thought and thinking, Imagination (Philosophy), Counterfactuals (Logic), Justice (Philosophy)

Subject Categories

Psychology

Abstract

Justice perceptions have been shown to be important to work outcomes, but their cognitive precursors are less understood. Fairness Theory offers a potential mechanism to help explain how they are formed. An experiment with 292 student respondents was conducted to study the effects of justice (i.e., just, ambiguous, unjust) and target (i.e., supervisor, organization) manipulations on counterfactual thought generation (i.e., mental simulations of plausible alternative realities) with the objective of elucidating the mechanism by which justice perceptions are formed. Findings suggest that negative counterfactual thoughts are prevalent explanatory vehicles that are used by individuals to make sense of justice-related situations. Additionally, negative ‘could’ counterfactual thought frequency and negative counterfactual strength were found to be negatively related to justice perceptions. Targets, which individuals direct blame or credit towards (i.e., individuals or entities deemed responsible) and valence of situations (i.e., affectively positive or negative situations) are important precursors that can exacerbate or attenuate the counterfactual generation process.

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