Anna Baumert

Bergische Universität Wuppertal | Uni-Wuppertal, BUW

The term ‘moral wiggle room’ (MWR) is often used to describe features of social situations that reduce the transparency between behaviors and their consequences. Previous research found that MWR decreases the likelihood of prosocial behavior and inferred that prosocial behavior is driven not only by genuine prosocial preferences but also by the des...

Anger, as a common reaction to injustice and due to its approach motivation, is assumed to fuel the costly punishment of others’ unjust acts, even if they do not affect one personally. Yet, to date, this causal role of anger in costly third-party punishment is underexplored. To close this gap, we conducted a series of seven studies (total N = 3249)...

In March 2021, Serbia made the unprecedented announcement to offer free Covid-19 vaccination to citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and notably to Bosniaks, against whom three decades earlier Serbia had waged a bloody war. How was this policy appraised and, most importantly, did the policy appraisal impact reconciliation? We report here the results...

The construct of justice sensitivity has four perspectives that capture individual differences in the strength of reactions to injustice when becoming a victim of injustice (victim sensitivity), when witnessing injustice as an outsider (observer sensitivity), when passively benefitting from an injustice done to others (beneficiary sensitivity), or...

The present research examined the psychological processes underlying engagement in non‐normative forms of resistance and the role of repression. We conducted two studies in the contexts of two distinct social movements, both characterized by high levels of repression— the Anti‐Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement in Hong Kong and the “Chilean Sp...

Moral courage manifests in actions aimed at stopping or redressing violations by others of moral principles such as fairness or caring, even when one is not personally or directly affected by those violations, and risks negative consequences by intervening.

Individuals and groups are frequently targets of bullying, sexual harassment, and hate speech on online platforms. Such norm violations can have detrimental negative consequences, for instance by causing psychological harm and damaging social cohesion. Finding ways to re- duce and prevent online norm violations is hence crucial. Online users may pl...

Introduction: Moral courage manifests in acts intended to intervene to stop or redress witnessed moral norm violations, despite the risk of negative consequences for the intervener. We investigate moral courage in everyday life and ask what personality processes are involved. Based on an extended process model of moral courage, we derived hypothes...

We investigated how the dispositional sensitivity to becoming the victim of injustice (victim sensitivity) is linked to the momentary processing of injustice and how such processes predict dispositional change. In two samples ( N = 149, N = 513), we combined four dispositional assessments across students’ first year at university, with intensive as...

While public health crises such as the coronavirus pandemic transcend national borders, practical efforts to combat them are often instantiated at the national level. Thus, national group identities may play key roles in shaping compliance with and support for preventative measures (e.g., hygiene and lockdowns). Using data from 25,159 participants...

Research on national identity distinguishes between national glorification and attachment. We tested whether glorification and attachment differentially predicted support for military and diplomatic conflict resolution strategies (CRS) in response to international conflicts. Using data collected in seven countries (Australia, United States, United...

Previous work has pointed to the anticipated reaction of the perpetrator of a norm violation (i.e, counterpunishment ) as a main discouraging factor of third-party punishment. To date, the only experimental study addressing the impact of counterpunishment (Balafoutas et al., 2014) demonstrated that, indeed, the likelihood of third-party punishment...

Intergroup conflicts can be triggered and perpetuated by collective perceptions of injustice. In two experiments, we applied the qualifying of subjective justice views, a justice-focused intervention initially introduced to resolve interpersonal conflicts, and evaluated whether it can mitigate intergroup conflicts. This intervention included explic...

U.S.-based research suggests conservatism is linked with less concern about contracting coronavirus and less preventative behaviors to avoid infection. Here, we investigate whether these tendencies are partly attributable to distrust in scientific information, and evaluate whether they generalize outside the U.S., using public data and recruited re...

Individuals differ systematically in how much they are concerned with matters of justice or injustice. So far, in various domains of life, such as romantic relationships, work, and school contexts, dispositional justice sensitivity has been found to be a powerful predictor of individual-level processing and interpersonal behaviors. Yet, matters of...

In six studies, we consistently observed costly third-party punishment (3PP) to decrease under ambiguity of the norm violation. Our research suggests that, under ambiguity, some people experience concerns about punishing unfairly. Those with higher (vs. lower) other-oriented justice sensitivity (Observer JS) reduced 3PP more pronouncedly (in Studie...

Moral courage, that is, defending moral beliefs despite personal risks, is often seen as a hallmark of prosocial behavior. We argue that prosociality in moral courage is however complex: While its prosociality is often evident at a higher societal level, it can be contested in some aspects of the morally courageous acts. We review literature on two...

Traditionally, personality psychology has been understood as the study of stability in people’s dispositions. However, a different strand of personality research has highlighted the importance of acknowledging and explaining the meaningful intraindividual variation in human thoughts, feelings, and behavior across different contexts and time. The go...

U.S.-based research suggests conservatism is linked with less concern about contracting coronavirus and less preventative behaviors to avoid infection. Here, we investigate whether these tendencies are partly attributable to distrust in scientific information, and evaluate whether they generalize outside the U.S., using public data and recruited re...

U.S.-based research suggests conservatism is linked with less concern about contracting coronavirus and less preventative behaviors to avoid infection. Here, we investigate whether these tendencies are partly attributable to distrust in scientific information, and evaluate whether they generalize outside the U.S., using public data and recruited re...

Personality processes are central for the entire discipline of psychology. Understanding intraindividual processes and the ways in which they differ interindividually is necessary to explain behavioral differences. Processes explain concrete behavior and they are responsible for individual change and normative development. They are the core of psyc...

In a now-classic study by Srull and Wyer (1979), people who were exposed to phrases with hostile content subsequently judged a man as being more hostile. And this “hostile priming effect” has had a significant influence on the field of social cognition over the subsequent decades. However, a recent multi-lab collaborative study (McCarthy et al., 20...

Moral courage is manifested when bystanders intervene to stop or prevent others’ norm transgressions, despite potential costs to themselves. Although theoretical models propose a key role of emotions, in particular anger, in the psychological processes underlying moral courage, to date this role is underexplored. In a behavioral study, we proposed...

We argue that it is useful to distinguish between three key goals of personality science – description, prediction and explanation – and that attaining them often requires different priorities and methodological approaches. We put forward specific recommendations such as publishing findings with minimum a priori aggregation and exploring the limits...

We argue that it is useful to distinguish between three key goals of personality science – description, prediction and explanation – and that attaining them often requires different priorities and methodological approaches. We put forward specific recommendations such as publishing findings with minimum a priori aggregation and exploring the limits...

We argue that it is useful to distinguish between three key goals of personality science—description, prediction and explanation—and that attaining them often requires different priorities and methodological approaches. We put forward specific recommendations such as publishing findings with minimum a priori aggregation and exploring the limits of...

Zusammenfassung Hintergrund: Zwangspatient/inn/en leiden, wie klinische Beobachtungen zeigen, häufig unter starker Schuld, was sich auch mit frühen psychoanalytischen Annahmen (übermäßig hohes Über-Ich) deckt, bis heute aber nicht spezifisch empirisch untersucht wurde. Auch aktuelle kognitionspsychologische Ansätze fokussieren auf diese emotionale...

Zusammenfassung Hintergrund: Zwangspatient/inn/en leiden, wie klinische Beobachtungen zeigen, häufig unter starker Schuld, was sich auch mit frühen psychoanalytischen Annahmen (übermäßig hohes Über-Ich) deckt, bis heute aber nicht spezifisch empirisch untersucht wurde. Auch aktuelle kognitionspsychologische Ansätze fokussieren auf diese emotionale...

There is an active debate regarding whether the ego depletion effect is real. A recent preregistered experiment with the Stroop task as the depleting task and the antisaccade task as the outcome task found a medium-level effect size. In the current research, we conducted a preregistered multilab replication of that experiment. Data from 12 labs acr...

Collective action researchers have recently started investigating solidarity‐based collective action by advantaged groups. This literature, however, has overlooked intergroup meta‐beliefs (MBs, i.e., beliefs about the outgroup’s beliefs), which we argue are crucial, since solidarity inherently involves protesting for the outgroup. In the context of...

In Western samples, individuals differ systematically in the importance they assign to matters of justice and injustice, and dispositional Justice Sensitivity can be differentiated according to the perspectives of victim, observer, beneficiary, and perpetrator. In a cross-cultural comparison between the Philippines, Germany, and Australia ( N = 677...

Background: Clinical observations suggest that many patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) suffer from severe feelings of guilt. These observations, which are consistent with psychoanalytic assumptions (overly strict super-ego), have rarely been subjected to systematic empirical investigation. Even cognitive approaches broach the issue o...

This study examined factors underlying collective action tendencies in a context of severe disadvantage and high repression. Drawing on the Social Identity Model of Collective Action (SIMCA; van Zomeren, Postmes, & Spears, 2008), we tested the roles of group-based anger, participative efficacy, group identity—SIMCA variables—but also fear. Although...

Structural approaches to personality have brought about considerable progress in description and prediction of interindividual differences in thoughts, feelings, and behavior. However, in order to move towards personality psychology as an explanatory science, we argue that structural, process-oriented and developmental approaches to personality hav...

Hintergrund: Zwangspatient(inn)en leiden, wie klinische Beobachtungen zeigen, häufig unter starker Schuld, was sich auch mit frühen psychoanalytischen Annahmen (übermäßig hohes Über-Ich) deckt, bis heute aber nicht spezifisch empirisch untersucht wurde. Auch aktuelle kognitionspsychologische Ansätze fokussieren auf diese emotionale Seite des Zwangs...

By bringing together a sophisticated conceptualization of political trustworthiness (integrated model of trust) with theorizing from information processing (trait inferences, inclusion-exclusion model), our research aimed at investigating the impact of a politician’s unlawful behavior on political trust. In four experimental studies, we investigate...

By means of transcranial direct current stimulation applied to the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, we investigated the causal role of increased or decreased excitability of this brain region for two facets of executive functions: working memory and Stroop interference control. We tested 1) whether anodal tDCS of the left DLPFC enhances working...

There is an active debate regarding whether the ego depletion effect is real. A recent pre-registered experiment with the Stroop task as the depleting task and the antisaccade task as the outcome task found a medium level effect size. In the current research, we pre-registered a multi-lab collaborating project to replicate that experiment. Data fro...

Our chapter introduces theory-based measures for the assessment of trust in specific politicians and politicians in general. In Study 1 (N = 317), the dimensionality, reliability, and relatedness to other concepts of trustworthiness of specific German politicians and politicians in general are investigated. In Study 2 (N = 248), the prediction of o...

In this book, 30 contributions provide a comprehensive overview of theories and findings from research on political attitudes and political behaviour, subdivided into the fields of ‘political communication’, ‘political attitudes’, ‘political participation’, ‘voting behaviour’ and ‘methods’.

Misst erhöhte Schuldwahrnehmung von Patienten mit einer Zwangserkrankung in vorgegebenen charakteristischen Situationen

Based on the thoughtful and thought-provoking comments, we strengthened some of the main proposals of our framework to integrate research on personality structure, process, and development. Integration is an important, yet challenging goal for personality science, and we see considerable potential for it, theoretically and in empirical research. We...

In this target article, we argue that personality processes, personality structure, and personality development have to be understood and investigated in integrated ways in order to provide comprehensive responses to the key questions of personality psychology. The psychological processes and mechanisms that explain concrete behaviour in concrete s...

Drawing on developments in personnel selection, Lievens proposed using Situational Judgment Tests and Assessment Centre exercises for personality research. These instruments simulate situations to elicit (typical or maximal) responses. Building on Lievens’s suggestions, we elaborate on how such simulations can be used to disentangle processes of pe...

Despite conceptual overlap between justice and morality, dispositional justice sensitivity (JS) has not been linked to processes of moral self-regulation. In a 1-year longitudinal study with four timepoints (N = 515) we tested how intra-individual changes in JS (from the perpetrator and beneficiary perspectives) and dispositional moral disengagemen...

The interplay of personality and social relationships is as fascinating as it is complex and it pertains to a wide array of largely separate research domains. Here, we present an integrative and unified framework for analysing the complex dynamics of personality and social relationships (PERSOC). Basic principles and general processes on the indivi...

Mõttus alerts us to the widespread predictive heterogeneity of different indicators of the same trait. This heterogeneity violates the assumption that traits have causal unity in their developmental antecedents and effects on outcomes. I would go a step further: broader traits are useful units for description and prediction but not for explaining p...

We applied the traits as density distributions of states approach to generalized expectations of trustworthiness, namely, social trust and trust in politicians. Using an experience sampling study (N = 47), we assessed state social trust and trust in politicians four times a day for 2 weeks. Within-person variability was found to be low but meaningf...

According to the Sensitivity-to-mean-intentions model, dispositional victim sensitivity involves a suspicious mindset that is activated by situational cues and guides subsequent information processing and behavior like a schema. Study 1 tested whether victim-sensitive persons are more prone to form expectancies of injustice in ambiguous situations...

The present chapter reviews findings on justice sensitivity as an indicator of an individual’s concern for justice. People differ systematically in their inclination to perceive injustice and the strength of their cognitive, emotional, and behavioral reactions. These differences have been found to be consistent across types of injustices and relati...

Studies assessing citizens’ attitudes towards Europe have mostly used explicit concepts and measures. However, psychologists have shown that human behaviour is not only determined by explicit attitudes which can be assessed via self-report, but also by implicit attitudes which require indirect measurement. We combine a self-report questionnaire wit...

Although moral courage is a highly desirable behavior whose determinants need to be understood, research has largely neglected the emotions involved in moral courage. Does anger about the norm violation or (anticipated) guilt enhance such interventions even if general mood does not? As previous studies have often failed to overcome the limitations...

In two experimental studies, we used a moral self-evaluation implicit association task to investigate reactions to personal moral transgressions. In Study 1, negative self-evaluation was higher after participants had been blamed for being late to the experiment compared to a control condition. In Study 2, participants imagined committing either (a)...

Perceived injustice can trigger strong emotional reactions and motivate political protest. Although there is vast empirical evidence for this chain of reactions, we know little about individual differences in how perceived injustice can motivate people to engage in political actions. In a survey study with 1,005 German participants, we investigated...

Interpretational tendencies in ambiguous situations were investigated as causal mechanisms of altruistic compensation. We used a training procedure to induce a tendency to interpret one's own advantages as unjustified. In a subsequent mixed-game, participants had to decide whether to invest their own money to compensate a victim of a norm violation...

The psychometric properties of behaviors in economic games as indicators of stable latent dispositions of altruism and fairness were tested in two studies. Using latent state-trait analyses, we explored the factor structure of offers in the dictator game, rejection decisions in the ultimatum game, and altruistic punishment and altruistic compensati...

People differ systematically in their vulnerability to injustice. We present two-item scales for the efficient measurement of justice sensitivity from 4 perspectives (victim, observer, beneficiary, perpetrator). In Study 1 using a quota-based sample of German adults, a latent state-trait analysis revealed the factorial validity and high reliabiliti...

We investigated the psychological reactions of laypeople to news reports about a political scandal. Participants were confronted with an alleged newspaper report about a fictitious politician’s holiday habits (control condition) or about the politician’s abuse of public funds (transgression condition). In the transgression condition, participants r...

Marshall and Brown (2006) proposed a Traits as Situational Sensitivities (TASS) Model, which implies a systematic person × situation interaction. We review this model and show that it suffers from several limitations. We extend and modify the model in order to obtain a symmetric pattern of levels and effects for both person and situation factors. O...

Moral courage is characterized as a bystander intervention against the norm violations of a perpetrator despite the potential for negative consequences for oneself. We tested a comprehensive set of potential personality determinants of moral courage derived from a model of helping. In Study 1, we used a vignette to assess the self-reported willingn...

This study examines the effect of justice sensitivity on the life satisfaction and job-seeking behavior of unemployed individuals and considers the likelihood of experiencing long-term unemployment. We focus on two facets of dispositional justice sensitivity that reflect individual differences in perception and reactions to perpetrating injustice a...

As theoretical considerations and empirical research suggest, human behav-iour is guided by a fundamental justice motive. In the present chapter, we dis-cuss two theoretical constructs that have been proposed to capture inter-individual differences in the strength of the justice motive: belief in a just world and justice sensitivity. We review rese...

We propose a triangulation of distributive justice theory, resource theory, and culture theory that sheds new light on cross-cultural differences in preferences for allocation principles. We propose that a culture’s standing on power distance, uncertainty avoidance, and masculinity/femininity will determine the importance of status, information, ma...

Chapter 17 by Anna Baumert and Manfred Schmitt features a triangulation of distributive justice theory, resource theory, and culture theory that sheds new light on cross-cultural differences in preferences for allocation principles. The authors propose that a culture’s standing on power distance, uncertainty avoidance, and masculinity/femininity wi...

The Psychology of Justice Individual Differences in Justice Sensitivity Conclusion References

We argue that replacing the trait model with the network model proposed in the target article would be immature for three reasons. (i) If properly specified and grounded in substantive theories, the classic state–trait model provides a flexible framework for the description and explanation of person × situation transactions. (ii) Without additional...

With two studies, we tested whether dispositional victim sensitivity involves one of two kinds of biased processing style: either a processing style in which unjust—but not just—information is processed more readily and accurately than neutral information, or a processing style in which unjust and just information is processed preferentially over n...

Individuals differ in how readily they perceive and how strongly they react to injustice. These differences are consistent across types of injustice and are stable across time. Thus, these patterns are seen as a personality trait called justice sensitivity. This trait can be differentiated into four facets that match with corresponding roles indivi...

Drawing on social resource theory, we investigated the evaluation of distributive justice principles in relation to material benefits (monetary rewards in working life) and symbolic benefits (praise at university) in a cross-cultural study. We predicted that the equity principle would be perceived as more just for distributing culturally valued res...

We investigated how Justice Sensitivity (JS) shapes the processing of justice-related information. We proposed that due to frequently perceiving and ruminating about injustices, persons high in JS develop highly accessible and differentiated injustice concepts that shape attention, interpretation and memory for justice-related information. Three st...

Emotion is assumed to facilitate the preparation of behavioral responses to environmental stimuli. In the present study, we examined whether emotional processing induced by spoken scenarios of positive and negative content, related to the self or to other people, modulates corticospinal excitability. Motor evoked potentials (MEPs) elicited by trans...

The interplay of personality and social relationships is as fascinating as it is complex and it pertains to a wide array of largely separate research domains. Here, we present an integrative and unified framework for analysing the complex dynamics of personality and social relationships (PERSOC). Basic principles and general processes on the indivi...

Previous studies on reciprocity of support in parent–child relationships during adulthood have focused on the needs of the recipient and other characteristics of the relationship, whereas the role of personality characteristics is not yet well understood. In the present research, we explored how prosocial dispositions and prosocial behaviour of bot...

The accessibility of concepts related to justice and injustice is proposed as a basic cognitive mechanism underlying the personality trait of justice sensitivity. To provide evidence for this assertion, the manner in which justice sensitivity shapes the interpretation of an ambiguous situation was investigated. It was found that, without priming, a...

This article investigates the psychometric properties of a self-report inventory for measuring individual differences in four components of justice sensitivity (JS): victim sensitivity, observer sensitivity, beneficiary sensitivity, and perpetrator sensitivity. A representative sample (N=2510) was employed to (a) estimate the reliability of a newly...

Five propositions are offered in reaction, to the target paper on interactionism in personality and social psychology. (1) The possible meanings of "dynamic interaction' need to be considered carefully. (2) Dynamic person x situation interactions that generate behaviour are different from interactions that cause personality change. (3) Dynamic pers...

Why do some people engage in costly bystander intervention against norm violations without any personal direct or indirect gains? The present study investigates justice sensitivity and moral emotions as determinants of such altruistic punishment. We propose that the individual strength of other-directed justice concerns explains the willingness to...

Recent intuitionist accounts have emphasised the role of immediate affective reactions in shaping moral judgement. In two studies, we adopted the affect misattribution procedure (Payne, Cheng, Govorun, & Stewart, 2005; JPSP) to assess immediate affective reactions toward moral stimuli. We investigated how immediate moral affect influences guilt exp...