In Korea, the complaints about unfairness are increasing. Especially, among the age of emerging adulthood(ages 18-25) ahead of entry into society, perception of unfairness is high, and this can increase aggression. Aggression is related to psychosocia...
In Korea, the complaints about unfairness are increasing. Especially, among the age of emerging adulthood(ages 18-25) ahead of entry into society, perception of unfairness is high, and this can increase aggression. Aggression is related to psychosocial maladjustment such as quality of interpersonal relationships, subjective well-being, and social rejection, thus necessitating intervention. In this study, we pay attention to the belief in a just world(BJW) as one of the variables that prevents the expression of aggression even when perceiving unfairness. BJW was a protective factor of aggression in overseas studies, but in a domestic study conducted for university students, BJW increased the aggression. It is necessary to investigate the cause of this inconsistent result. The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between BJW and aggression in university students. In addition, although it is very important to distinguish two sub-factors of BJW, there is a limit to the fact that domestic studies do not distinguish them. Therefore, this study divides the two sub-factors: personal BJW and general BJW. Moreover, we focused on normative beliefs about aggression and moral disengagement as moderators that can explain the relationship between BJW and aggression.
This study was conducted on 273 college students aged between 18 and 25. Based on the collected data, the fact that BJW is composed of two factor structure was confirmed through confirmatory factor analysis(CFA). Also, as a result of independent sample t-test, men showed higher belief than women in both sub-factors of BJW. Correlation analysis and moderation analysis were further performed. As a result, personal BJW was protective factor of aggression only in women, and general BJW had no significant predictive power in both gender. Moreover, normative belief about aggression predicted aggression in itself, but there was no moderating effect in the relationship between personal/general BJW and aggression. Moral disengagement not only predicted aggression positively but also, especially in the case of women, it moderated the relationship between personal/general BJW and aggression. To be specific, when moral disengagement was above the average, the more aggressive the personal BJW, the less aggression. In part of general BJW, aggression increased as the general BJW was stronger only when moral disengagement was very low.
As a hypothesis, personal BJW was a protective factor for aggression, but only for women. The first hypothesis of this study was partially supported because general BJW was not significantly related to aggression in both men and women. The second hypothesis was not supported as normative belief about aggression did not control the relationship between the two BJW and aggression. On the other hand, moral disengagement moderated personal/general BJW and aggression respectively, but the effect was significant only on women and the opposite result to the hypothesis was revealed. In summary, the protective effect of personal BJW on aggression was only significant when moral disengagement was above average. General BJW increased aggression only when moral disengagement was very low. Possible reason for these results is that women are more likely to experience unfairness than men, so that they have a stronger motivation to protect their belief that the world is fair through perceptual distortions. During this process the desire for aggression, which is socially unaccepted, would also have reduced. Therefore, the result from the Korean study that BJW predicted aggression positively could have been derived from the fact that the level of moral disengagement was very low among the women participants. This study is meaningful in that it provides the basic data for the aggression intervention of the emerging adulthood by searching each function of the personal/general BJW as the protection factor of aggression.