Does inequality pose special challenges for organisations? Drawing on Aristotle’s ethical thought, as well as more recent work on a particular cognitive bias known as the ‘Just World Fallacy’, I argue (in my recently published paper) that it does.
“Just World Fallacy” is a cognitive bias that occurs when individuals are confronted with examples of injustice. Specifically, these individuals tend to show disdain for innocent victims and admiration for the undeservedly successful. In other words, we interpret even random allocations of rewards and harms as being reflective of justice.
In his original 1965 study, Melvin J. Lerner found that participants who were told that someone had won a cash prize in a random draw were inclined to believe that person had worked harder than another person who had not won the prize. In a later study, Lerner and Simmons found that when confronted with an innocent victim – in this case, a woman apparently being punished with electric shocks for making mistakes in a learning task – participants chose to “devalue and reject the victim” (1966, p.209), and became more likely to do so when the punishment was more severe. Other research into the Just World Fallacy has shown that people are inclined to blame AIDS victims, victims of assault, and victims of spousal abuse, but are inclined to praise beneficiaries of gambling gains. Furthermore, those most prone to commit the Just World Fallacy are least likely to take action when they perceive an injustice.
These are interesting findings in their own right, but also have important consequences for organisational life, and undermine the appealing notion that organisations can be communities characterised by a sense of friendship, compassion and, perhaps above all, of shared purpose. This way of thinking about communities is rooted in the thought of the ancient Athenian philosopher, Aristotle (2014, 2017). Aristotle held that we are naturally inclined to form communities – we are ‘political animals’ as the saying goes – and that only within communities can we truly flourish.
The Just World Fallacy threatens the community status of organisations because it undermines the kind of participation communities require. Such participation requires us to be able to deliberate together about the good of that community, and a key part of that deliberation pertains to justice. Unless we are able to assess whether people deserve the rewards or harms they receive, we will be unable to follow the basic principles of justice that a community requires. According to research into the Just World Fallacy, people are liable to believe that others are due precisely what they are given, and so what should result from shared deliberation—judgments about who deserves what and why—in fact precede and shape it.
While this argument makes me pessimistic about the possibility of achieving a genuine sense of community within organisations, in my article I suggest some ways in which we can try to shape organisations so that they approximate the ideal of community as closely as possible. These are: to cultivate a suspicion of inequality, to minimise displays of unequal power, to emphasise face-to-face interactions that might help to encourage the emergence of friendships, and to ensure relatively equal pay. These recommendations are, no doubt, difficult to achieve, and even where they are, they may not be sufficient to meet the challenge posed by the Just World Fallacy entirely – after all, the fortuitous reward in Lerner’s original study was US$3.50 (worth approximately US$27 today) – but they may make the aspiration to community more achievable.
References:
Aristotle. 2014. Nicomachean Ethics (trans. C.D.C. Reeve). Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.
Aristotle. 2017. Politics (trans. C.D.C. Reeve). Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.
Lerner, M. J. 1965. Evaluation of performance as a function of performer’s reward and attractiveness. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1: 355–360.
Lerner, M. J., Simmons, C. H. 1966. Observer’s reaction to the “innocent victim”: Compassion or rejection? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 4: 203–210.
Sinnicks, M. 2020. The Just World Fallacy as a Challenge to the Business-As-Community Thesis. Business & Society, 59(6).