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, regardless of whether the outcome of the process was fair or unfair, favorable or unfavorable. The discovery of procedural justice effects was important because it showed that it is possible to increase feelings of fairness by using the right procedure, so that even those who lose or experience negative outcomes can feel fairly treated.

A good example of a procedural justice effect is seen in the first experiment that Thibaut, Walker, and their colleagues conducted on the topic. Participants in that study found themselves involved in a complex dispute resolution process because another member of their team had been accused of cheating. The experiment varied whether the participant knew that his or her teammate had in fact cheated, whether the outcome of the “trial” was favorable or unfavorable (the participant's team was either exonerated or found guilty), and whether the dispute resolution procedure did or did not give the participant a voice in determining what evidence was considered or denied. The results showed a clear effect for the procedure the participant had experienced. Voice procedures were seen as fairer than were procedures that placed all the control and input in the hands of the decision maker. In addition, regardless of whether the participant's team won or lost the trial, and regardless of whether the outcome of the trial conformed to the participant's private knowledge about the teammate's behavior, the voice procedure led to greater satisfaction with the verdict and greater perceived fairness in the trial outcome than did the mute procedure. Of course, winning participants were generally more satisfied than losing participants, and correct decisions were generally seen as fairer than incorrect decisions, but in each combination of the other factors, the voice procedure prompted more positive reactions. Subsequent studies have shown that such voice effects have a powerful impact on procedural fairness judgments in a variety of organizational and governmental contexts. When people are given an opportunity to control what information is considered by a decision maker, especially when they are given an opportunity to express their views about the situation under consideration, the procedure is seen as fairer.

Subsequent work by Robert Folger and others showed that decisions that come from fair procedures are more readily accepted than those from unfair procedures, a phenomenon Folger dubbed the fair process effect. Later research showed that when people believe that the process used to reach a decision is fair, they are more likely to accept the decision. In many of these studies, the way processes were made fair was by including an opportunity for voice on the part of those affected by the decision.

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