| dc.description.abstract | Justice has been argued to be a key ethical principle guiding interactions with other humans. The principle is embedded in the professional ethics code for the American Psychological Association and other professional organizations. In this thesis, I provide some evidence that prominent interventions aimed at helping people make better decisions are perceived as less just than others, and thereby do not fully respect the principle of justice. My studies are the first to suggest that a popular nudging strategy, framing, doesn’t reliably perform better than the control (i.e., not receiving a positive or negatively framed message). However, well-constructed educational interventions often increase perceptions of justice, thereby respecting the principle of justice more fully. Study 1 was devoted to developing a measure of perceptions of 4 key types of justice (i.e., distributive, procedural, informational, and interpersonal). These perceptions of justice were contextualized in the plastic recycling domain. In Studies 2 and 3, I use the perceptions of justice measure created in Study 1 to measure (potentially differential) perceptions of justice of a hypothetical recycling company between two choice architecture interventions: framing nudges and education interventions. Results suggest that there may be both practical (e.g., lower satisfaction) and ethical (e.g., lower perceptions of justice) costs associated with framing nudge interventions that are not present in education interventions. Findings such as these may begin to justify more thorough evaluations of choice architecture interventions, including both practical (e.g., satisfaction) and ethical (e.g., perceptions of justice, among other values) considerations. I close by outlining this evaluation through Ethical Interaction Theory and discuss the tangible costs associated with perceptions of injustice. | en_US |
