Social Comparison and Fairness

Abstract

People care about fairness. They care about the fairness of their outcomes (distributive justice) and the fairness of the procedures used to allocate outcomes (procedural justice). Fairness can have implications for current outcomes (e.g., "Did I get what I deserved?"), expected outcomes (e.g., "If nothing changes, what am I likely to get in the future?"), and plans about how to obtain outcomes (e.g., "What can I do to improve my expected future outcomes?"). In such ways, fairness judgments resemble those studied in the social comparison literature, which addresses how people come to understand themselves (Suls, 1977) and related questions (e.g., "Did I get what I deserved? Can I accomplish some future task? If I am unlikely to succeed at some future task, what can I do to improve my future task performance?"). Social comparison information can be highly diagnostic for such questions. In fact, sometimes answering questions about ourselves, such as about our relative attractiveness or intelligence, can only be known by comparing our thoughts, behaviors, and feelings with those of other people (Gilbert, Giesler,