The role of the justice motive in economic decision making Claudia Dalbert * , Sören Umlauft Department of Educational Psychology, Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg, Franckesche Stiftungen, D-06099 Halle/Saale, Germany article info Article history: Received 22 August 2007 Received in revised form 4 March 2008 Accepted 9 July 2008 Available online 9 September 2008 JEL classification: DA12 PsycINFO classification: 2360 Keywords: Dictator game Economic decision Justice motive Just-world belief Implicit processes abstract In two studies, a dictator game was used to investigate the hypotheses that two types of justice motives should be differentiated, the need to belief in a just world and a self- attributed justice motive, that both justice motives could explain the decision for equal allocations, and that the explicit justice motive could explain the avoidance of an egoistic allocation. In Study 1, both justice motives predicted equally well the decision for an equal allocation, whereas the explicit justice motive predicted the avoidance of an egoistic allo- cation. A similar pattern of results emerged in Study 2. Additionally, the explicit but not the implicit justice motive covaried with social desirability, and social desirability explained the decision for equality and the avoidance of an egoistic allocation just as well as the explicit justice motive. Finally, allocation decisions were better explained in Study 2, where real money was at stake. The findings support the idea that allocation decisions can best be understood by taking the just world justice motive and social desirability into account. Ó 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Allocation decisions are typical examples of justice-specific reactions. They are widely investigated in the context of social- moral development (Damon, 1977; Takezawa, Gummerum, & Keller, 2006) and human altruism (Fehr & Fischbacher, 2003). Based on justice motive theory (Dalbert, 2001), we hypothesize that allocation decisions can be explained by two types of justice motives: (a) the need to belief in a just world and (b) the justice-related self-concept or self-attributed justice motive. We use experimental game theory to test our hypotheses (Güth, Schmittenberger, & Schwarze, 1982). In the different par- adigms of experimental game theory, the task is usually to allocate a certain amount of money. This money is generally a windfall that has not been earned by either the recipient or the allocator. A typical view is thus that it would be fair to dis- tribute the money equally and egoistic for the allocator to keep all of the windfall. The conditions under which the decision is made differ across allocation games. These allocation games are of particular interest in the context of justice research, because the allocators have to decide whether or not to dispose of the money fairly, thus giving a clear indication of how much they care about justice in the world. Our participants played the dictator game, in which the allocator has to decide how much, if any, of the money to give to an anonymous recipient whom s/he will never meet, and who has no say in the decision. In other words, the allocator acts as a dictator, who may decide to keep all the money without any negative repercussions. Interestingly, however, most players 0167-4870/$ - see front matter Ó 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.joep.2008.07.006 * Corresponding author. Tel.: +49 345 5523811; fax: +49 345 5527135. E-mail address: claudia.dalbert@paedagogik.uni-halle.de (C. Dalbert). Journal of Economic Psychology 30 (2009) 172–180 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Economic Psychology journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/joep