Attentional Processes Guided By Justice Sensitivity: Evidence from a Modified Stroop Task

Justice Sensitivity (JS) as a personality disposition is indicated by the frequency of perceived injustice and the intrusiveness of thoughts about injustice. Thus, JS maps how perceived acts of injustice are cognitively processed. The present research aims to investigate the nature of this process in more detail. For persons high in JS, injustice schemata are expected to be more readily accessible, thus, their attention should be more focused on unjust aspects of a social event. In the present study, people high or low in JS witnessed either an unjust or a neutral event. Afterwards, they completed a modified Stroop task. Target words varied with regard to their justice-relatedness and their valence. Results indicated that persons high in JS showed higher latencies for injustice-related and negative words than for justice-related and positive words. Thus, the attentional bias involved in JS appears to be evaluative in nature. Furthermore, this attentional bias is shown to be specific for the observer component of JS.