Welcome back. This is savvy psychologist. I'm Dr. Ellen Hendrickson and every week I'll help you meet life's challenges with evidence-based research, a sympathetic ear, and zero judgment.

Inequality, privilege, and injustice blare from the headlines.

But when faced with an unjust world, how do you cope?

Do you dwell on unfairness?

Take the law into your own hands?

Or stay out of the fray.

Well, listener Melissa writes from San Francisco. She says, I struggle with letting go of any kind of

injustice, whether it's on the national level, such as the unfair treatment of minorities or

something as small as another customer skipping in front of me in line I really

tend to dwell on this wrongdoing and she points out that even though human brains often wander to thoughts of revenge, she doesn't think she would derive much satisfaction from it.

And so she asked me to riff on injustice and revenge with a goal of understanding herself and her fellow humans a little better.

So as it turns out, Melissa is not alone in her struggle to let go of injustice, inequity, or unfairness. In fact, it is a personality

trait called justice sensitivity, and it's defined as our awareness of and reactivity to injustice.

So in other words, it's pretty much how finely tuned our antennae are to corruption, inequality, unfairness,

and generally getting screwed. Now in fact there are four types of

justice sensitivity. The first is called victim justice sensitivity which is

constantly staying on the lookout to make sure we don't

get screwed. But this vigilance often goes along with being angry or a tendency towards revenge.

Okay, but next is observer justice sensitivity, which is outrage when observing unfair treatment

of others without being directly involved.

So a great example of this was the outpouring of protest at the American government on behalf of

immigrant families who were being separated at the border. Okay, third is

...