Procedural Justice

Procedural justice refers to the fairness of decision-making procedures and of other social and organizational processes. In social psychology, virtually all research on procedural justice refers to subjective procedural fairnessthe subjective feeling that one has been treated fairly under a given procedure. Early psychological studies of the impact of justice judgments focused on judgments of whether outcome distributions were fair or unfaira topic called distributive justice without paying much attention to the procedures used to arrive at the outcome allocation. In the early 1970s, however, experimental studies of psychological reactions to various legal procedures showed that procedures have their own impact on feelings of fairness. Psychologist John Thibaut, law professor Laurens Walker, and their colleagues showed that some procedures result in feelings of greater fairness, ...