Assessing the connection between students' justice experience and perceptions of faculty incivility in higher education

This study assesses the association between students' individual justice experience and their perceptions of faculty incivility (FI) in higher education. Drawing on justice psychology, the study argues that the way students intuitively perceive, process and evaluate their teachers' just behavior is a key component of their psychosocial learning environment. Building on the assumption that the processing of environmental stimuli depends on individual-level factors, the role of belief in a just world (BJW) is also examined as a personal predictor of students' experiences of their teachers' behavior. The main hypothesis is that students' positive evaluation of their teachers' just behavior, informed by their personal BJW, is negatively connected to perceptions of their teachers' behavior as uncivil. A mixed-method approach was applied to map features of FI, and to construct and validate a new scale for measuring these features in higher education settings. Teachers' just behavior and BJW were used as criterion variables to further assess construct validity of the new scale and to give initial empirical information about the interplay between individual justice experience and faculty incivility. The findings offer a justice-based account of how students read and respond to faculty conduct, and provide a validated tool for future research on incivility in higher education.