When Small Acts Are Multiplied: Assessing Everyday Social Justice Behaviors

Abstract

Using the Act Frequency Approach, we drew on majority White, U.S. samples to create a new measure of social justice behavior and examine its correlates. Although existing measures of social justice behavior focus on engagement in collective action, participants in Study 1 (n = 137) were encouraged to nominate and evaluate a broad set of acts relevant to their daily lives. The final 17-item Everyday Social Justice Behavior (ESJB) scale reflects a range of global and domain-specific actions rated as prototypical by both 53 undergraduate novices and 20 social justice experts in Study 2. Participants in studies 3 (n = 388) and 4 (n = 613) were then asked to rate how frequently they perform the items. As expected, women and sexual minorities, and those with left political orientation, engaged in more everyday social justice behavior. Moreover, those reporting more everyday social justice behavior also scored higher in structural attributions of social change, intersectional awareness, ratings of the importance of and confidence in taking action, openness to experience, extraversion, and empathy, while being lower in social dominance orientation, system justification, and the need for cognitive closure. In addition, those high in ESJB also reported more progressive activist engagement and intentions. Relations with activism were modest, suggesting social justice activism and ESJB are somewhat distinct forms of social justice behavior. This measure should be of broader use in similar (majority White) samples; the measure development process can also be used to assess such behaviors in other samples and contexts.