6. General discussion
Three studies, taken together, provide empirical support for our hypothesis that just-world beliefs act as a distinct psychological mechanism explaining cultural differences in preferences for performance-based versus redistributive pay systems. Study 1 showed that individual preferences for performance-based compensation schemes correlated with JWBs in a culturally diverse sample of professionally experienced graduate students. Study 2 showed that American undergraduate participants had stronger preferences than French undergraduates for using performance-based metrics to determine their own individual payment for an experimental task. Importantly, cultural differences in JWBs mediated these effects. Study 3 experimentally manipulated JWBs and provided the first empirical evidence of the operation of JWBs as a psychological mechanism that causes cultural differences in preferences for economic redistribution. Following an increasingly common approach to demonstrating psychological mechanisms in cross-cultural and social psychological research, Study 3 held national culture constant and experimentally manipulated the proposed cultural mechanism (JWBs) via a moderation-of-process design (Spencer et al., 2005). This conceptually replicated the mediated effects of cultural differences between France and the U.S. in Study 2, offering further evidence of the role of JWBs in the underlying psychological process of generating preferences for more or less redistributive pay systems.
