平均还是平等?不同工作情境下的分配公平感知

Equality or Equity? Distributive Justice Perceptions in Different Work Contexts

分配公平是人类社会生活的重要追求,主要包括两个理论:平均理论与平等理论。平均理论的拥护者认为只要收入不均便为不公平,而平等理论的支持者则认为如果不均的收入可以反映工作量、努力程度等方面的差异,那么收入也可视为公平。基于这两个理论,国内外大量的研究者进行了讨论和研究,但是还存在一些争议,并且不同工作情境下的分配公平感知也尚不清楚。因此,该研究通过双方合作任务,进一步考察了人们的分配公平感知。该任务包括两个角色:翻译员(高工作量者)与校对员(低工作量者)。二者的工作量之比是固定的,具体来说,翻译员的工作量是校对员的三倍。并且二者均没有决定如何分配报酬的权力。在熟悉了工作情境后,二者需要对三种分配方案(3:1,1:1和1:3)进行公平评级(?3到+3)。同时设计了工作类型相同的任务为基线。结果发现,工作类型相同的情境下,二者均认为与工作量匹配的分配方案更公平;工作类型不同的情境下,二者则倾向于平均分配。并且,当工作类型由相同变为不同时,二者对3:1分配方案的公平评级明显降低,对其他两种方案的评级明显增加。这表明工作情境会影响人们的分配公平感知。已有研究表明人们厌恶偏离自我贡献的分配方案,因此实验二考察了人们对于收入的自我贡献和其分配公平感知的关系。实验二让二者同时评定了不同工作情境下的分配方案的公平性和自我贡献的程度(0%~100%),结果重复了实验1的结果。除此之外,还发现工作类型相同时,人们的自我贡献评级与工作量之比无显著差异,工作类型不同时人们的自我贡献评级则与50%无显著差异。这表明人们的自我贡献认知与分配公平感知一致,进一步支持了平等理论。

Distributive justice is considered as an important pursuit in human social life, including two main theories: equity theory and equality theory. Proponents of the equity theory argue that it is not fair to distribute the income unequally, whereas supporters of the equality theory claim that income inequalities can be fair if they reflect relevant differences, such as workload and work effort. Based on these two theories, the domestic and foreign scholars have carried on a long-term discussion and the researches. However, those studies still have some disputes and the distributive justice perceptions in different work contexts remains unclear. Therefore, a two-person co-opera- tive task was designed to further investigate humans’ distributive justice perceptions. In our adopted task, there are two work roles. One is the translator (the people with high workload), and another is the checker (the people with low workload). The ratio of their workload was fixed. To be more specifically, the translator’s workload was triple than the checker’s. And they both have no power to decide how to divide the earned money. And after they are familiar with the whole situation, they both are required to rate three allocations (3:1, 1:1, and 1:3) on a scale that ranged from very unfair (?3) to very fair (+3). At the same time, the same work-type situation was designed as a baseline. It displayed that they tend to judge the distribution which matches the workload fairer in same work-type situation, while they tend to judge the equal allocation fairer in different work-type situation. Moreover, when the work context transitioned from same work-type situation to different work-type situation, their subjective ratings for 3:1 dropped significantly, and the ratings for the other offers increased significantly. These findings suggest that work context can influence individuals’ distributive justice perceptions. In fact, some researches pointed out that people are averse to deviations from an income distribution in proportion to their contribution. Therefore, experiment 2 was conducted to test the relationship between participants’ self-contribution to the income and their distributive justice perceptions. In experiment 2, participants not only need to evaluate the fairness of the three allocations in each of two situations, but also need to rate their self-contribution from 0% to 100%. The results replicated our findings in experiment 1. In addition, their self-contribution had no significant differences with the proportion of their workload when their work types were the same. But when their work types were different from each other, they judged the equal allocation fairer. And their contributions had no significant difference with 50%. These results demonstrate that peoples’ self-contribution perceptions are consistent with their distributive perceptions. The present findings, to our knowledge, provide further behavioral evidence for equity theory.