Role of intentionality in mediating responses to inequity in the dyad.

Abstract

According to Adams' equity model, members of a dyad whose work inputs are equal endeavor to divide their joint reward equally. If one member, who was responsible for dividing the reward, chose to give the other member more than half or less than half, the other member would experience inequity. When given an opportunity to divide a second reward, the other member's division was expected to compensate the initial inequity. However, if the other member was over-or underrewarded by chance, he was expected to ignore the initial reward and compute equity on the basis of the second reward alone, thus dividing the second reward about equally. Results, based upon 72 ninthgrade students, confirmed the predictions and suggest that outcomes intentionally produced by relevant others are included in the computation of equity, while unintentional outcomes are ignored.

Warm glow and charitable giving: Why the wealthy do not give more to charity?

“…Equity theory (Adams, 1963;Homans, 1961) posits that judgments of the fairness of a given distribution will reflect one's perceptions of parties' effort levels. And, indeed, experiments show that people are satisfied with their outcomes to the degree that they perceive the distribution of rewards to be proportional to parties' effort (see e.g., Lane and Messe (1971) and Garrett and Libby (1973)). Both over-rewarded and under-rewarded individuals feel discomfort and will take actions to restore an equity balance (see, e.g., Walster, Berscheid, and Walster (1973), Walster, Walster, and Berscheid (1978), Lowenstein, Thompson, and Bazerman (1989)).…”

When Giving Is Good: Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex Activation for Others' Intentions

“…Judgments based on others’ actions, however, can be biased by a range of individual and situational factors, such as the observer’s personality, the stereotypes he or she holds, or what other information is provided (Kelley, 1973; Marston, 1976). If participants in similar economic games, for example, are given different intentions for the other players (that they are compelled by the experimenter, or by chance), then the same selfish or generous actions are judged less harshly or kindly (Garrett and Libby, 1973; Singer et al, 2004). …”

A Model of Faking Likelihood in the Employment Interview

“…To make this prediction we draw primarily from three sources: the literature on justice and equity, the literature on cheating, and qualitative input from candidates who started to engage in faking during employment interviews because of their perceived unfair treatment at previous interviews. The literature on justice and equity has established that people will try to restore justice or equity if they were treated unfairly or inequitably (e.g., Garrett & Libby, 1974;Reis & Burns, 1982). Also, there are some real-life examples collected by Wells (2004) showing that employees who felt unfairly treated sometimes committed occupational fraud.…”