Beginning with the assumption that a justice motive exists, the author posits that belief in a just world influences the behavior of most people most of the time. This is true for all people of all ages and in all areas of life, for those struggling with their daily tasks as well as for those coping with a critical life event. An individual's belief in a just world is a necessary condition for a person's sense of fairness and mediates its adaptive effect on mental health.

This book provides a unique overview of the development of justice-related beliefs in different socialization contexts, and also of the role this plays in protecting mental health and promoting career development for adolescents and young adults. A range of European contributors bridge the conceptual gap between social and developmental psychological perspectives and use a number of original case-studies. This book provides new insights for justice psychology and adds new and important perspectives to studies on youth development.

This book contains essays in honour of Melvin J. Lerner, a pioneer in the psychological study of justice. The contributors to this volume are internationally renowned scholars from psychology, business, and law. They examine the role of justice motivation in a wide variety of contexts, including workplace violence, affirmative action programs, helping or harming innocent victims and how people react to their own fate. Contributors explore fundamental issues such as whether people's interest in justice is motivated by self-interest or a genuine concern for the welfare of others, when and why people feel a need to punish transgressors, how a concern for justice emerges during the development of societies and individuals, and the relation of justice motivation to moral motivation. How an understanding of justice motivation can contribute to the amelioration of major social problems is also examined.

How do individual differences interact with situational factors to shape social behavior? Are people with certain traits more likely to form lasting marriages; experience test-taking anxiety; break the law; feel optimistic about the future? This handbook provides a comprehensive, authoritative examination of the full range of personality variables associated with interpersonal judgment, behavior, and emotion. The contributors are acknowledged experts who have conducted influential research on the constructs they address. Chapters discuss how each personality attribute is conceptualized and assessed, review the strengths and limitations of available measures (including child and adolescent measures, when available), present important findings related to social behavior, and identify directions for future study.

Central to the book are questions concerning the existence and the characteristics of justice motives, and concerning the influence that justice motives and justice judgements have on the emergence, but also the solution of social conflicts. Five main themes will be addressed: (1) “Introduction and justice motive”, (2) “organizational justice”, (3) “ecological justice”, (4) “social conflicts”, and (5) “solution of conflicts”. The authors of the editions are scholars of psychology, as well as distinguished experts from various other disciplines, including sociologists, economists, legal scholar, educationalists, and ethicists. The common ground of all contributors is their independent conduction of empirical research on justice issues. Apart from the German contributors, authors represent scholars from the US, India, Korea, New Zealand, and various European countries (Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands, UK, Sweden).

The Handbook of Moral Motivation offers a contemporary and comprehensive appraisal of the age-old question about motivation to do the good and to prevent the bad. From a research point of view, this question remains open even though we present here a rich collection of new ideas and data. Two sources helped the editors to frame the chapters: first they looked at an overwhelmingly fruitful research tradition on motivation in general (attribution theory, performance theory, self-determination theory, etc.) in relationship to morality. The second source refers to the tension between moral judgment (feelings, beliefs) and the real moral act in a twofold manner: (a) as a necessary duty, and, (b) as a social but not necessary bond. In addition, the handbook utilizes the latest research from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives, wishing to suggest by this that the answer to the posed question will likely not come from one discipline alone. Furthermore, our hope is that the implicit criticism that the narrowly constructed research approach of the recent past has contributed to closing off rather than opening up interdisciplinary lines of research becomes in this volume a strong counter discourse. The editors and authors of the handbook commend the research contained within in the hope that it will contribute to better understanding of humanity as an inherently moral species.