Prof. Steel / Research Interests
My primary research interests deal with understanding justice reactions following transgressions in social dilemmas. Specifically, I have been concerned with situational, affective, and cognitive factors that lead underprivileged or under-compensated group members to seek justice following negative or undesirable outcomes. Put simply, I want to better understand the circumstances that lead people to react to others who have harmed them in some way, and I have used a social dilemma paradigm in most of this work due to the level of control offered in these situations. In my research, participants are made to suffer some loss (usually monetary). After suffering a loss of goods (or sometimes a loss of face), individuals must decide 1) whether or not to take action and 2) what type of action to take. Thus far, I have conducted research assessing several different justice seeking reactions including procedural justice behaviors (attempting to change the established rule system to avoid exploitation in the future), restorative justice reactions (attempting to force the over-benefited member(s) to compensate one or more under-benefited members), and retributive justice actions (seeking punitive damages—financial, physical, or otherwise—to restore a sense of fairness).
I have conducted several studies in an attempt to manipulate social factors that might alter the chosen course of action following social transgressions. In this research, I attempt to manipulate participants’ justice concerns, which I believe will, in turn, alter their subsequent justice-seeking behaviors. I find the notion of experimentally manipulating justice concerns in order to understand compensation and/or revenge to be quite fascinating, and I have faith that future application of this research might allow for better understanding of any number of social problems (from racial discrimination to nuclear arms races). However, the current research utilizes common, every-day dilemmas as I attempt to tease out the situational, affective, and cognitive variables that influence human ideas of fairness and resulting attempts to reinstate justice (when appropriate).
To outline the decision processes underlying distinct justice motivation in social dilemmas, I coauthored a paper in Personal and Social Psychology Review (Schroeder, Steel, Woodell, & Bembenek, 2003) proposing a multi-stage, sequential model of justice motives, which assumes that the behavioral reaction that follows an unfair outcome is determined by a logical sequential pattern. According to the model, distributive justice concerns (seeking equity) prevail with no regulation so long as equity exists among group members. However, when a threshold of inequity is reached (as often happens in unregulated systems due to rational maximizing strategies by individual group members), justice motivations shift to procedural concerns in an attempt to standardize rule systems that can provide assurance that fairness will be achieved in the future. According to the model, this procedural system, once implemented, will provide a standard for the status quo so long as the system is deemed appropriate by group members and is executed fairly in accordance with the rules. However, if the procedural system breaks down (e.g., if the rule system does not provide equitable outcomes among group members), individuals must shift their justice motives once again. It is our contention that group members will (1) seek compensation in an effort to restore the status quo, (2) seek retribution as a punitive reaction to the instigator’s delinquency, and/or (3) enact procedural change as a means to repair the ineffective rule structure. It is the specific situational factors that influence the choices between these three justice-seeking options that most interest me at this time. The first empirical test of the Schroeder et al. model served as the premise of my dissertation work (which is currently under revision for journal submission).
In addition to behavioral reactions to injustice, I have also become interested in the cognitive triggers that lead to what we have come to call the “recognition of necessity” (recognizing that some action is absolutely necessary – justice must be reinstated). Some of this work was presented at the 10th International Conference on Social Dilemmas in Marstrand, Sweden and will be highlighted (as a book chapter) in an edited volume based on selected presentations from that conference (Biel, Eek, Garling, & Gustafson (Eds.) New Issues and Paradigms in Research on Social Dilemmas). In terms of my interest in cognitive triggers that bring about justice reactions, I have attempted to link the counterfactual thinking process (thoughts of what “could have been”) to justice-seeking behaviors. I (as many before me have done) had great difficulty in assessing participants’ counterfactual thoughts, and, as a result, I shifted my focus (due to time constraints) to other arenas for my doctoral dissertation (as discussed above). Nonetheless, I am still intrigued by counterfactual thoughts - I even have several thoughts of what “could have been” regarding the research program itself. Because I believe that counterfactual thinking may be a necessary condition for any justice/fairness judgment, I would like to revisit the counterfactual process in my research. Specifically, I would like to utilize methodologies generally associated with a cognitive science focus in my effort to understand the cognitive precursors to justice desires. For instance, if I could determine the types of counterfactual thoughts that under-benefited individuals experience (e.g., “at least” counterfactuals vs. “if only” counterfactuals) and whether these thoughts are conscious (or not) and spontaneous (or not), I believe I could better understand the process of justice-seeking (and revenge in particular). In addition, I might be able to manipulate the type of counterfactual thoughts individuals experience and then observe the relative effects of these thoughts on subsequent justice-seeking behaviors. I am still working out the specific details of this methodology; but generally speaking, I think it would be quite possible to assess reaction times for agreement with counterfactual sentence stems, which might suggest the relative spontaneity of these different kinds of “wishful thinking.”
To conclude, I would like to continue this line of work in an effort to better understand the cognitive, emotional, and behavioral reactions within everyday human experience and how these experiences contribute to assessments of justice and fairness. I feel that my interest in this area could not only contribute to the literature on justice, social dilemmas, and counterfactual thinking, but could also act as a catalyst for collaboration and undergraduate education. Because I view myself as an educator, researcher, and collaborator, I would like to use my research interests as a means of bringing students and interested colleagues together, and I hope that the diverse interests of others will spur new directions for my research as well.