Personality and Everyday Social Justice Behavior: "A Broader Set of Acts"

Abstract

This dissertation contributes to the growing body of literature exploring activist behaviors intended to promote social justice. Across 3 studies, a new measure of social justice behavior was created and validated using the Act Frequency Approach (Buss and Craik, 1980). Although existing measures of social justice behavior tend to narrowly define the construct as engagement in collective action, participants in Study 1 (n = 137) were encouraged to nominate and evaluate a broad set of acts also relevant to their daily lives. The final 22-item Everyday Social Justice Behavior (ESJB) scale reflects a range of global and domain-specific actions that were rated as prototypical by both 53 undergraduate novices and 20 activist experts in Study 2. Participants in study 3 (n = 388) were then asked to self-rate how frequently they perform each of the items in the ESJB scale, along with a series of other measures of proposed correlates. Consistent with Hypothesis 1, both membership in marginalized groups (e.g. women, sexual minorities) and holding a political orientation on the left side of the spectrum were positively related to scores on the ESJB scale. Moreover, confirming Hypothesis 2, ESJB scores were positively related to structural attributions of social change, intersectional awareness, beliefs about the importance and confidence in taking action, openness to experience, extraversion and empathy, and negatively related to social dominance orientation, system justification, and the need for cognitive closure Furthermore, consistent with Hypothesis 3, ESJB was correlated moderately with another established measure of progressive activist engagement, suggesting that they are related, yet distinct measures of social justice behavior. Finally, confirming Hypothesis 4, there were significant group differences between participants who scored high on both ESJB and Collective Action for Social Justice (CASJ) as compared to participants who scored high on only one measure or low on both. Overall, the findings affirm the benefits of the Act Frequency Approach to behavioral measure development and the value of using it to explore the relationships between individual differences and social justice behaviors.