Justice for all? Progress in research on cultural variation in the psychology of distributive and procedural justice

We review progress in research attempting to model the influence of culture on judgments of justice. We review research on people's reactions to resou rce allocation outcomes (the psychology of distributive justice), as well a s on people's reactions to the processes through which authorities make dec isions (the psychology of procedural justice). We describe the progress fro m early work in which culture was equated with country differences to later work which focused on dimensions of values (e.g. individualism-collectivis m) that mediate country differences and important contextual factors (e.g. in-group versus out-group) that moderate them. Yet we also describe pitfall s of this research strategy. Finally, we describe a recent trend toward gre ater specificity in conceptions of cultural influence-more specific value-d imensions, more specific contextual factors, and the inclusion of specific knowledge structures.