justice sensitivity

Why does justice sensitivity exist?

If you struggle to read facial expressions, interpret tone, or understand the unspoken hierarchies that guide neurotypical social interaction, you need to make up for this by finding something more concrete you can rely on. And rules about fairness tend to be more explicit than other social rules. They provide a guide for understanding what is acceptable and what is not, and what the appropriate reaction might be.

With this in mind, justice sensitivity could have developed as a coping mechanism for navigating social uncertainty. ²

Clarity is caring, and certainty is safety. And if you cannot be sure what’s in other people’s heads, then you have a stronger need for everyone to agree on the rules. Without that consensus, there’s no clear guideline for what’s fair and appropriate. The rules become your map through the social terrain that would otherwise be incomprehensible or foggy.

But when those rules break down (because they’re applied inconsistently, or people violate them without consequence, or the stated rule turns out to be different from the actual rule), you lose your map. You lose your safety net. And that’s terrifying. No wonder it feels horrible.

What justice sensitivity feels like

You might experience justice sensitivity as a physical sensation: a tightness in your chest, heat & cold sweat rising, your thoughts racing to document every detail of what went wrong. The violation might replay in your mind, sometimes for hours or days. Neurotypical people might tell you that it’s “not a big deal” and “just let it go“, but your brain is stuck in a loop trying to solve an unsolvable problem: how do you navigate a world where the rules don’t mean what they’re supposed to mean?

The intensity of the experience can be just as strong whether

In fact, justice sensitivity can kick in when the situation is fictional, and happens to someone in a book, a film, or even in a hypothetical future situation.

The single common thread is the rule violation itself.

Multiple brain areas can activate at the same time

Sometimes, especially as we get into adulthood, the distress of justice sensitivity can feel disproportionate even to you. A sibling is getting a slightly bigger piece of cake. A teacher gives one student an extra two minutes on a test. A friend cancelled plans for a legitimate reason.

The later-developed parts of your brain might kick in: the bits that interpret logic might help you cognitively understand the situation is minor. You might have trained yourself to appreciate that the other person had valid reasons. Still, the more ancient parts of your nervous system are still responding to the pattern violation.

And that’s okay. Understanding that something is reasonable on the intellectual level doesn’t make a threat response disappear.

So when it happens, it’s usually less useful to try to out-argue the situation. Instead, you probably need time and space to regulate and decompress.

What does justice sensitivity look like from the outside?

From the outside, justice sensitivity often gets misread as rigidity, oppositionality, or overreaction. You’re told you “can’t let things go,” that you’re “the sort of person who just always has to be right,” or that you’re “making a mountain out of a molehill.” People see what they interpret as an an excessive reaction to a minor issue because for them the issue might be minor (or thinking of the issue as minor is the socially acceptable option).

What remains hidden is how you’re trying your best to cope with your entire nervous system sounding all the alarms about a threat to your core navigational system.

This can create a painful feedback loop:

1. You react to an injustice,
2. people tell you you’re overreacting,
3. that feels like another injustice (because they’re dismissing your legitimate concern)
4. that intensifies your initial reaction,
5. which then strengthens their initial belief that you’re being unreasonable
6. and so on,
7. and so forth.

Unfortunately, despite your best efforts, sometimes people respond to what they assume you’re feeling rather than what you’re actually experiencing. You might be calm and explaining something rationally, but because others in the situation expect you to be upset, they treat you as if you already are. Being treated as if you’re overreacting when you’re not then becomes its own injustice that actually does upset you, making you do extra work yet again to navigate this.

There’s a big danger here because over time, many neurodivergent people internalise these messages. You might start questioning whether your perceptions are valid, whether you’re “too sensitive,” whether something is wrong with you for caring so much about things that other people seem to able to ignore just fine.

Examples of justice sensitivity

Justice sensitivity can uncover some real injustice and unfair situations, or provide insights into what matters to you. It can come up in a lot of different situations. Here are just some examples:

• You might feel intense distress about a teacher applying rules inconsistently, and that might point to real bias in how they treat students.
• You might feel betrayed because as a child you were told to “just work hard and you’ll succeed in life,” only to discover there were unspoken rules about presentation, social class, or who you know that you didn’t realise existed and couldn’t easily adhere to. Being told to do your best and then watching objectively less qualified people get promoted because of who they know – yes, that is genuinely upsetting. It’s not just in your head.
• You might be told to “just be yourself”, but then punished for behaviours that are authentically you.
• Being told “honesty is important”, but then getting in trouble for pointing out when someone is lying.
• You might feel outraged because you followed what you understood as the rules for social interaction and didn’t get the outcome you expected. Your understanding of those rules might have been based on assumptions about reciprocity (“if I’m always there for another person when they need me, I can expect them to be there for me when I need them” is a classic one). This can also lead to discussions about communication styles and boundaries, though, and strengthen relationships after misunderstandings.

The intensity of the reaction doesn’t tell you which of these situations you’re in. Many times, your reaction is warranted because unfair things are happening, and you are right to be upset by them. Other times, it might be something that requires reflection, an outside perspective, and a willingness to examine the rules you’re operating out of.

Justice sensitivity across the neurodivergent population

We don’t have an overwhelming amount of research on justice sensitivity. What we do have, though, shows that neurodivergent people, particularly ADHD and autistic people, experience significantly elevated justice sensitivity compared to neurotypical populations:

• Autistic children seem to have more rigid criteria for what constitutes ‘morally wrong actions’ compared to neurotypical peers.³

• ADHD folks report higher sensitivity to being treated unfairly and to witnessing injustice, but also lower sensitivity to recognising when they themselves might be treating others unfairly.¹ This might not be a feature of justice sensitivity, though — it sounds more like it’s got to do with the trait area of difficulties with self-awareness and self-reflection (maybe-possibly relating to communication between internal systems, like in the case of alexithymia).

Justice sensitivity also appears to mediate the relationship between ADHD symptoms and other challenges like depression, conduct problems, and low self-esteem.¹ This suggests that the intense reactions to perceived injustice contribute to emotional dysregulation and mental health difficulties—not because the perception is wrong, but because living with heightened awareness of unfairness in an often-unfair world is exhausting and distressing.

Justice sensitivity or rigid thinking?

Justice sensitivity doesn’t exist in isolation. It clusters with other neurodivergent traits that share a common thread: the need for predictability and clear patterns in an unpredictable world.

Justice sensitivity connects directly to other traits that pop up in neurodivergence and Autism especially, namely intolerance of uncertainty and rigid thinking/cognitive rigidity. _{(As it is often the case when it comes to naming neurodivergent traits, these are also hugely pathologising, but let’s not unpack this here, because we’ll be here all day; it’s a story for another time. 🙂 )}

Rigid thinking and justice sensitivity often appear together because they’re both responses to the same challenge: navigating social complexity without reliable access to implicit information. When you can’t flexibly shift between perspectives or easily update your understanding of how things work, consistency becomes even more critical. The rules need to stay stable because you can’t quickly adapt when they change.

Intolerance of uncertainty amplifies justice sensitivity. If ambiguity feels threatening, rule violations become doubly distressing: they’re unfair and unpredictable. You lose not only the sense that things are fair, but also the ability to anticipate what will happen next.

Justice Sensitivity, ODD and demand avoidance

This is also why justice sensitivity sometimes gets misdiagnosed as Oppositional Defiant Disorder or misunderstood in the context of demand avoidance (another set of horribly named things, yay).

When someone refuses to follow a rule they perceive as unfair or inconsistently applied, from the outside it can look like deliberate opposition. But from the justice sensitivity perspective, the refusal stems from the rule violation itself. If a rule has been applied inconsistently or seems arbitrary, following it can feel like participating in something fundamentally broken or manipulative. In these cases, the demand to comply with an unjust or inconsistent rule is double whammy: a pattern violation that triggers justice sensitivity, combined with being told to accept something that doesn’t make sense, triggering a strengthened need for autonomy.

As the topic of oppositional defiance usually comes up in school and other childhood settings, the onus really should be on the adults in the room to not misread and label reactions based on what the surface-level behaviour looks like, but make the effort to try and understand what underlying elements might be informing that behaviour.

Justice sensitivity is morally neutral

On the biological level, justice sensitivity seems to stem from a strong need for clarity & unambiguity.

This, in itself, is completely separate from the morality of the ‘rules’ that our nervous system is monitoring for.

Justice sensitivity makes you acutely aware of rule violations and inconsistencies, and creates intense distress when patterns don’t hold. But the rules your brain is tracking and the patterns you expect come from a combination of:

• what you’ve been taught,
• what you’ve observed,
• and what you’ve internalised.

When applied to the complexity of the world we live in, any of the ‘rules’ can turn out to be helpful or harmful, realistic or unrealistic to uphold, or morally right or wrong, depending on wider cultural norms, social expectations, and the exact context.

We might learn that rules we’ve stored away as children are not as useful as we thought they were. Other rules might turn out to have been based on false assumptions (either someone else’s or our own).

Like in so many other areas of adulthood, much of the practice is learning about grey areas and making decisions around coping or living with them.

Autism doesn’t make us pure baby angels (thankfully)

There’s this romanticised narrative about autistic people being “pure” or “inherently moral” that’s both infantilising, ableist and inaccurate. Justice sensitivity is a mechanism, not a moral compass, and autistic people are not the arbiters of absolute fairness. (Please don’t put ultimate decisions on morality on our shoulders, we have enough stuff to deal with, thank you.)

Someone can be intensely justice-sensitive and hold bigoted beliefs, feeling outraged when those beliefs are challenged. They can feel victimised when they don’t get what they feel entitled to. They can rigidly enforce rules that are actually harmful, or use “but it’s not fair” as a weapon to maintain their own advantage. The trait itself is morally neutral. Justice sensitivity tells you when a rule has been violated, but it doesn’t tell you whether the rule was good, accurate, or fair in the first place.