According to the Sensitivity-to-mean-intentions model, dispositional victim sensitivity involves a suspicious mindset that is activated by situational cues and guides subsequent information processing and behavior like a schema. Study 1 tested whether victim-sensitive persons are more prone to form expectancies of injustice in ambiguous situations and whether these expectancies mediate the relationship between victim sensitivity and cooperation behavior in a trust game. Results show an indirect effect of victim sensitivity on cooperation after unfair treatment (vs. control condition), mediated by expectancies of injustice. In Study 2 we directly manipulated the tendency to form expectancies of injustice in ambiguous situations to test for causality. Results confirmed that the readiness to expect unjust outcomes led to lower cooperation, compared to a control condition. These findings provide direct evidence that expectancy tendencies are implicated in elevated victim sensitivity and are of theoretical and practical relevance.

In Western samples, individuals differ systematically in the importance they assign to matters of justice and injustice, and dispositional Justice Sensitivity can be differentiated according to the perspectives of victim, observer, beneficiary, and perpetrator. In a cross-cultural comparison between the Philippines, Germany, and Australia ( N = 677 students), we investigated whether Justice Sensitivity can be equivalently described by these four perspectives, whether measurement instruments have invariant psychometric properties, and whether the psychological relevance of the Justice Sensitivity perspectives for cooperation behavior differs between these cultural contexts. The results of multigroup confirmatory factor analyses support weak measurement invariance and invariant associations between Justice Sensitivity perspectives and trust game decisions. Across cultures, victim sensitivity predicted reluctance to cooperate under threat of exploitation, and observer, beneficiary, and perpetrator sensitivities predicted cooperation under temptation. Our study extends insight into Justice Sensitivity to underresearched cultural contexts of urban and rural Philippines.

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Interpretational tendencies in ambiguous situations were investigated as causal mechanisms of altruistic compensation. We used a training procedure to induce a tendency to interpret one's own advantages as unjustified. In a subsequent mixed-game, participants had to decide whether to invest their own money to compensate a victim of a norm violation. The amount of one's own resources invested as an altruistic compensation was enhanced after the training procedure compared to controls. These findings suggest that interpretational patterns with regard to injustice determine prosocial behavior. The training procedure offers a potential intervention strategy for enhancing altruistic compensation in bystander situations in which people must invest their own resources to restore justice.

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