The Structure of Social Justice Judgments: A Facet Approach

This study examines the structure of social justice judgments (SJJ) on the basis of a conceptual mapping of two major facets of SJJ: distributive rules and social resources. We distinguish irreducible classes of rules (e.g., arithmetic equality, effort) and resources (e.g., money, prestige) and examine their affinities and contrasts in an effort to unveil the patterns of relations among them. A similarity space analysis (SSA) reveals that the predicted distinctions and relations among SJJ correspond to actual judgments made by adolescents regarding the relative importance of distributive rules in allocating different social resources.