Feelings of social justice and injustice are related to social distance which will be the subject of this paper. Apart from two types of social distance, a concept of interaction and of similarity, we introduce a reference concept. What counts is the weight other people carry for a person and the influence they exert on him when forming an opinion concerning certain objects and subjects, or put in other words which people are part of a person's frame of reference and to what extent. The concept of social distance is operationalized on the basis of the social filter function that translates the objective income distribution into the subjective norm on incomes as reflected by the response to the income evaluation question. Our asymmetric concept can be applied to both person-to-person, person-to-group and group-to-group relationships alike. The social distance concept is empirically illustrated with respect to income for a moderate sample of less than 500 respondents.
