| In the various scientific disciplines that had good reasons to study social justice in human life, there have been explicit debates or implicit assumptions about what can be labeled as rationalist versus intuitionist justice conceptions. Rationalist models emphasize that reasoning causes justice judgments to be constructed primarily in a deliberate, objective, and cognitive way. In contrast, intuitionist notions suggest that justice judgments are mainly the result of automatic evaluations and are heavily influenced by subjective and affective factors. Now is the time to test these models properly by using theories and methodology from modern social psychology, thereby adopting an integrative approach in which conditions are studied that influence the relative importance of the two models. In doing so, we combine the literature on automatic behavior and social cognition and affect with recent fundamental research on the role of uncertainty in the justice judgment process, resulting in improved understanding of justice, automaticity, social cognition and affect. |
