Procedural Justice

Any interaction among people involves procedures or processes through which the people involved coordinate their actions. Procedural justice is the study of [Page 600]people's subjective evaluations of the justice of those procedures—whether they are fair or unfair, ethical or unethical, and otherwise accord with people's standards of fair processes for interaction and decision making. Procedural justice is usually distinguished from subjective assessments of the fairness of outcomes (distributive justice) and the degree to which people feel that they are gaining or losing resources in the group (outcome favorability).

The procedures found in groups, organizations, and societies have several key elements. First, there are those aspects of interaction linked to problem solving or decision making—that is, to managing group tasks. Second, there are the broader interpersonal dynamics of people's interactions with others—that is, the socioemotional aspects of procedure. Both aspects of procedures can be distinguished conceptually from the outcomes of group interaction and decision making, although in practice the procedures of a group and the outcomes it arrives at are typically found to be related.

Group procedures can potentially be evaluated objectively by considering the quality or content of interactions within a group, or they can be evaluated subjectively by asking people to report about their judgments about particular procedures. The distinction involved is that objective evaluations are linked to what actually occurs within the group, while subjective evaluations examine people's judgments and evaluations. Objective and subjective procedural assessments are typically studied separately, although procedures can be evaluated against both objective and subjective criterion at the same time.

Irrespective of whether they are making objective or subjective evaluations, people can potentially evaluate procedures along many dimensions, dimensions such as their speed, their accuracy, their degree of bias, and so on. Within social psychology, a large literature has developed that focuses on evaluations of procedural justice. This literature focuses on one key dimension of procedures—their justice or fairness. In the procedural justice literature, people are typically asked to evaluate a procedure along a general continuum of fairness-unfairness.

Procedural justice studies can focus on the objective features of procedures that are associated with their subjective fairness. Thibaut and Walker's (1975) classic work on procedural justice, for example, is concerned with the fairness of two forms of trial procedures—the adversarial and the inquisitorial. Their work codes features such as the actual impact of bias on decisions to determine which procedures have objective features, like neutrality, that the researchers associate with fairness. This leads to evaluations of the objective quality of different procedures, when judged against performance criterion identified by the researchers.

In contrast, the subjective study of procedural justice explores people's evaluations of the fairness of procedures. It is concerned with what people judge to be a fair process or procedure (Lind and Tyler 1988; Tyler 2000; Tyler et al. 1997). Such subjective evaluations may or may not be linked to particular objective characteristics of procedures. While both aspects of procedural justice have been studied by psychologists, most of the recent work on procedural justice has focused on subjective evaluations of fairness.

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