Justice in the Eye of the Beholder: How Comparison Framing Affects the Perception of Global Inequality Through Social Emotions and Justice Sensitivity
Global inequality is one of today’s major challenges. How people mentally represent inequality is often determined by its comparative framing. In the present work, we seek to analyze whether putting the focus of a comparison on the disadvantaged or advantaged group affects legitimacy perceptions of and action intentions against global inequality. Results of two preliminary studies indicated that global inequality is perceived as less legitimate and action intentions are increased when the disadvantaged group is the grammatical subject of the comparison, but only when the size of the economic inequality is perceived to be large (vs. small). In addition, social emotions mediated the relationship between comparative framing and legitimacy perceptions. Building on these preliminary studies, we present a planned large-scale study in which we aim to replicate these effects and to additionally test whether the strength of individuals’ emotional responses to comparative framing is moderated by their justice sensitivity. We will discuss findings with regard to the role of how framing elicits certain mental representations of justice.