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Perceptions Of Fairness In The Frustration Effect: An Attributional Analysis, David T. Van Dyke

Student Work

Theories of both distributive (Adams, 1963) and procedural justice (Thibaut & Walker, 1975) have been demonstrated to be accurate in describing subjective evaluations of fairness in a wide variety of circumstances. However, a phenomenon known as the frustration effect (e.g. Folger, 1977) results in perceptions of fairness that are incongruent with the predictions of these two theories. This study attempts to explain the discrepant results in terms of attribution theory as it was proposed by Weiner (1985). By manipulating and measuring the attributions made by subjects, the attributional explanation was tested. The results of this experiment were not supportive of …