Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Immanent Justice Reasoning by Spatial Proximity

Immanent Justice Reasoning by Spatial Proximity Immanent justice reasoning involves causally attributing someone’s bad outcome to their prior immoral actions. Building on the idea that causality is mentally linked with spatial proximity, we investigated whether such reasoning might lead participants to spatially bind together immoral actions and bad outcomes. Across four experiments (N = 553, Mechanical Turk workers), participants positioned sentences describing other people’s bad (vs. good) outcomes closer in space to previous immoral behaviors. This effect was observed both when the position of the initial action remained in a fixed location and when it “chased” the outcome across the screen. Importantly, we also found that this spatial positioning of immoral actions and bad outcomes is mediated by perceived deservingness of the outcome and is not merely due to perceived similarity of events. These findings suggest that perceived deservingness biases the spatial proximity of representations of others’ random bad outcomes and their prior immoral actions. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Social Psychological and Personality Science SAGE

Immanent Justice Reasoning by Spatial Proximity

Download PDF
9 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/sage/immanent-justice-reasoning-by-spatial-proximity-ipSSycrWib

References (33)

Publisher
SAGE
Copyright
© The Author(s) 2020
ISSN
1948-5506
eISSN
1948-5514
DOI
10.1177/1948550619893969
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Immanent justice reasoning involves causally attributing someone’s bad outcome to their prior immoral actions. Building on the idea that causality is mentally linked with spatial proximity, we investigated whether such reasoning might lead participants to spatially bind together immoral actions and bad outcomes. Across four experiments (N = 553, Mechanical Turk workers), participants positioned sentences describing other people’s bad (vs. good) outcomes closer in space to previous immoral behaviors. This effect was observed both when the position of the initial action remained in a fixed location and when it “chased” the outcome across the screen. Importantly, we also found that this spatial positioning of immoral actions and bad outcomes is mediated by perceived deservingness of the outcome and is not merely due to perceived similarity of events. These findings suggest that perceived deservingness biases the spatial proximity of representations of others’ random bad outcomes and their prior immoral actions.

Journal

Social Psychological and Personality Science – SAGE

Published: Jan 1, 2021

There are no references for this article.