Visual Attentional Bias toward Injustice: Cause or Consequence of Justice Sensitivity?

This paper explores the relation between Justice Sensitivity and an attentional bias toward just and unjust stimuli by the means of the visual dot probe task. This task has been applied sucessfully in anxiety research and works as follows: (In)justice-related and neutral stimuli are presented briefly at alternative locations on a computer screen, and a small visual probe is displayed subsequently in one of these locations. It is assessed how rapidly participants identify a probe replacing the neutral or the (in)justice-related word, respectively. It was found that the higher a person scores in Justice Sensitivity, the more he or she displays a bias toward unjust (but not just) stimuli after witnessing an unjust incident. Unfortunately, this result is impaired severely by lacking reliability of the dot probe task. In a second study, the dot probe task is employed to train participants to focus on or avoid (in)justice-related stimuli by displaying the probe always in the former location of the (in)justice-related or the neutral word. A training toward (in)justice was expected to produce a more pronounced attentional bias, stronger emotional and behavioral reactions to actually observed injustice, higher Justice Sensitivity scores, and a higher willingness to act against observed injustice. The training to avoid (in)justice should have a reversed effect. Against expectations, the training groups showed no according differences. However, when the original JS scores were included in the analysis, one of the predicted training effects was confirmed: persons who were trained to pay attention to (in)justice were more willing to show solidarity by contributing time or money to Amnesty International than persons trained to avoid (in)justice.