E. Allan Lind

Duke University | DU · Fuqua School of Business

This chapter describes a model of the justice judgment process. It is proposed that people used their perceptions of fairness as a heuristic to assess the quality and nature of their relationship to important groups and institutions to which they belong. The implications of this notion for the development and use of fairness cognitions are explored...

In this volume we have seen that procedural justice phenomena are reliable and robust and that they are ubiquitous features of social life. Chapter 9 summarizes the effects and processes that are observed regularly in procedural justice studies and offers hypotheses about how procedural justice might work in as yet untested contexts. Our goal in th...

This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note...

I describe what I see as a very strong connection between fairness perceptions and reactions that show engagement with social entities and social relationships. A brief review of studies on perceived fairness and the fair process effects illustrates how very social is the reaction to fair or unfair treatment—that is, how perceptions of fairness hav...

I describe what I see as a very strong connection between fairness perceptions and reactions that show engagement with social entities and social relationships. A brief review of studies on perceived fairness and the fair process effects illustrates how very social is the reaction to fair or unfair treatment-that is, how perceptions of fairness hav...

There are two substantial literatures in social and organizational psychology that sit at the interface of uncertainty and fairness concerns. Work on "informational uncertainty" examines how people respond to lack of certainty about the informational bases of fairness judgments. Work on "personal uncertainty" addresses how fairness processes are th...

A brief encyclopedia entry from the Encyclopedia of Leadership Studies.

A chapter on Fairness Heuristic Theory

Intro for Frontiers book

An exploration of theoretical and empirical connections between fairness perceptions and trust in leaders.

Using two randomized controlled courtroom experiments on actual litigants at court hearings, we examine a thus far unexplored reason why perceived procedural justice can be strongly associated with litigants' trust in judges and legitimate power assigned to judges. We argue that because litigants try to make sense of what is happening at their hear...

Citizens’ perception of fairness, in process as much as in outcome, is a critical dimension of trust. People must feel they have a real voice, be treated with respect, and receive necessary explanations. Positive perceptions of fairness lead to greater acceptance of agency decisions, better compliance with regulations, and more co-operative behavio...

Building Trust in Government and Regulation. Research and theory on the psychology of procedural justice give clues concerning how governments can structure their interactions with citizens to improve trust and increase compliance with laws and regulations.

A preview of a textbook on the Sitkin and Lind Six Domains of Leadership model. This excerpt describes the model and the core ideas in each of the six domains; it also includes calls to action and reflection.

A description of social science research and theory relevant to enhancing citizen engagement in, and the perceived legitimacy of, regulatory procedures.

This paper argues that being in the Asch situation, where there is a felt need to conform to others’ faulty behaviors, poses a social threat to people. Furthermore, participating in a psychology experiment in which you will have to interact with other participants might trigger sense-making processes. The paper proposes that these assumed threats o...

Giving employees the opportunity to voice their opinions about decisions affecting them has been lauded for its ability to facilitate desirable organizational outcomes. However, recent social cognitive theory suggests one potential undesirable consequence of voice— namely that being given voice may lead to an increased reliance on stereotypes when...

A presentation about how physicians can improve their leadership of staff and patients. Notable especially for the information on how physicians can lead patients to better health.

This paper examines several hundred cases in which citizens were contacted in an 'informal' way by public officials as part of the Dutch Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations' Fair Tracks project. In Fair Tracks, public officials engage in direct and interpersonal conversations with citizens when the officials are about to make a negative...

This paper describes a body of work on the social psychological implications of behavioral inhibition and disinhibition. Many social philosophers, economists, and other theorists have long assumed that it is good when people inhibit their behaviors, because behavioral inhibition will lead people to refrain from egoistic and socially undesirable beh...

Many organizational policies and practices are based on the view that people's behavior needs to be inhibited to protect against their selfish basic nature. Indeed, a fundamental assumption of theories ranging from social exchange to economic models of organizational behavior is that individuals are primarily oriented to gain good outcomes for them...

We examine how interpersonal behavior and social interaction influence team sensemaking and subsequent team actions during a hospital-based health information technology (HIT) implementation project. Over the course of 18 months, we directly observed the interpersonal interactions of HIT implementation teams using a sensemaking lens. We identified...

Treating employees fairly produces many positive outcomes, but evidence suggests that managers’ efforts to be fair are often unsuccessful because they emphasize the wrong aspects of justice. Managers tend to emphasize distributive justice, though employees may be most concerned with procedural and interactional justice. Organizational justice theor...

This article focuses on social situations in which people are surprised about what is happening and inhibited about how to respond to the situation at hand. We study these situations by examining a classic topic in social psychology: how people respond to receiving better outcomes than are deserved. In these situations, the actions of an authority...

This chapter analyzes cultural differences in fairness perception process--and changes in cultural effects over time--using newer theory from the social psychology of procedural justice.

A content analysis of fair and unfair experiences described by students as customers of health care services was made. The way customers had been treated by the staff during the implementation of procedures, along with the information exchange between client and service providers turned out to have a strong impact on justice perception. An outstand...

Purpose – In this chapter, we seek to resolve the conflicting implications that emerge from status quo theories of justice, on the one hand, and theories of distributive, procedural, and interactional justice on the other. Specifically, status quo theories depict individuals as resistant to perceptions of injustice in their social environments, whe...

Leaders' fairness may be just one of several heuristics—cognitive shortcuts—that followers use to decide quickly whether they can rely on a given leader to lead them to ends that are good for the collective, rather than just good for the leader. Other leadership heuristics might include leader prototypicality and leader self-sacrifice. We hypothesi...

Extending theory within the justice domain and work on the human alarm system, the current paper argues that the process by which justice judgments are formed may be influenced reliably by the activation of psychological systems that people use to detect and handle alarming situations. Building on this analysis, it is further proposed that if this...

Three studies examined the effects of perceived procedural justice and the favorability of a group-level outcome on the endorsement of a group-level decision and the evaluation of the authority responsible for the decision. Results showed that, contrary to findings usually seen with individual-level decisions, collective outcome favorability was mo...

The authors focus on the effects an authority’s apparent inconsistency between persons on judgments of relational treatment and procedural justice following negative procedures (i.e., procedures that people commonly regard as unfair). In Experiment 1, participants responded most negatively following a procedure that denied them, but granted another...

Negotiators often have different expectations about the future. A contingent agreement, or a bet that makes the ultimate outcome dependent on some future event, builds on negotiators' differences. The authors argue that a problem-solving approach, in which negotiators thoroughly explore options to build on their differences, is most likely to const...

In this article on fairness heuristic theory, we point out some important flaws in Arnadóttir's (2002) claim that fairness heuristic theory is "not empirical," by which Arnadóttir meant that theory's predictions are knowable a priori, and are not contingent upon circumstances. To this end, we demonstrate that empirically testing effects predicted b...

We analysed a stakeholder participation process undertaken by the North Carolina Division of Water Quality to see if the process satisfied elements of procedural justice: representation of relevant parties, voice, sound technical basis, fair treatment by authorities and absence of bias. The rushed timeframe for the process compromised several eleme...

This research examines how people integrate social reports regarding another person's injustice experience into their own justice assessments. Specifically, we examine three variables—participant injustice experience, co-worker injustice severity, and prior contact with co-worker's supervisor—that influence the degree to which individuals express v...

This research examines how people integrate social reports regarding another person's injustice experience into their own justice assessments. Specifically, we examine three variables-- participant injustice experience, coworker injustice severity, and prior contact with coworker's supervisor--that influence the degree to which individuals express...

This book contains essays in honour of Melvin J. Lerner, a pioneer in the psychological study of justice. The contributors to this volume are internationally renowned scholars from psychology, business, and law. They examine the role of justice motivation in a wide variety of contexts, including workplace violence, affirmative action programs, help...

It is no accident that the first systematic study of the psychology of procedural justice involved the application of psychological method and knowledge to legal issues: few areas of human endeavor place as much emphasis on procedure and process as does the law. As will be seen in later chapters, the procedures used in other social institutions pro...

The only way in our opinion to account for this striving for justice and truth is by the analysis of the whole history of man, socially and individually. We find then that for everybody who is powerless, justice and truth are the most important weapons in the fight for his freedom and growth (Fromm, 1942/2002, p. 248).

The relative deprivation construct has been widely used in the social sciences to explain phenomena from experiencing psychosomatic stress to participating in urban riots. It is currently a valuable tool in research, being used especially to understand processes of social identity and responses to disadvantage by both disadvantaged minorities and p...

The goal of the authors in this chapter is to define a fraternalistic version of procedural justice, and to contrast its effects to those of fraternalistic outcome deprivation, using two types of data. The first type addresses the concern identified by W. G. Runciman (1966): judgments about a person's own group relative to others. This issue is add...

This article focuses on how people interpret their own versus others’ treatment. Two experiments investigate how perceived procedural justice is affected by procedures that are experienced personally versus those seen to have been experienced by others. The studies show that, at least under some conditions, the treatment of others is as potent a co...

We tested predictions from fairness heuristic theory that justice judgments are more sensitive to early fairness-relevant information than to later fairness-relevant information and that this primacy effect is more evident when group identification is higher. Participants working on a series of three tasks experienced resource failures that interfe...

In his commentary on Cropanzano et al. (2001), the author notes that their literature review is thorough and well done. He centers his commentary around four main points. First, he argues that justice research as reviewed by Cropanzano et al. is not as focused on answering broad questions about organizational psychology as much as it should be. Sec...

The findings of 4 studies suggest that cultural values about power distance influence the way that people react to third-party authorities in a manner predicted by the relational model of authority (T. R. Tyler & E. A. Lind, 1992). Power-distance values reflect beliefs about the appropriate power relationship between authorities and their subordina...

Structured interviews with 996 recently fired or laid-off workers provided data for analyses of the situational and psychological antecedents of both thinking about filing a wrongful-termination claim and actually filing such a claim. Potential antecedents were drawn from relational theories of organizational justice, economic theories about claimi...

The literature on the `myth of self-interest' model of perceived human motivation suggests that people believe that both they and others are more motivated by self-interest than is actually the case. Four studies are reported which test one implication of the myth of self-interest: the psychology of pre-experience preferences and post-experience ev...

On the basis of fairness heuristic theory, the authors argue that when information about whether an authority can be trusted is not available, people will resolve the question of how they should interpret the decisions of the authority by relying on perceived procedural fairness. As a consequence, people who do not have information about authority'...

On the basis of fairness heuristic theory, the authors argue that when information about whether an authority can be trusted is not available, people will resolve the question of how they should interpret the decisions of the authority by relying on perceived procedural fairness. As a consequence, people who do not have information about authority'...

Past research demonstrates that quality of treatment is linked to support of authorities and acceptance of their decisions, particularly when the authority represents a valued ingroup. The group-value model suggests that the group membership effect occurs because people derive important self-relevant information from evaluations of how they are tre...

The fairness of treatment can be inferred from 2 aspects of the relationship between authority and other party: the person-related aspect and the role-related aspect. One hundred seventy-five American detainees were interviewed about their encounters with police officers and correctional officers. The role-related aspect affected procedural fairnes...

The authors refine and extend their explanation of the psychology of the fair process effect (the positive influence of procedural fairness on outcome evaluations). On the basis of fairness heuristic theory's substitutability proposition, the authors predicted and found that outcome evaluations show strong effects of procedural fairness when outcom...

Analyzes situations in which a group engages in 2 dilemmas, a social dilemma and an escalation dilemma, in 1 of 2 orders. Some of the groups (there were 109 groups of 3, or 327 people) were composed of long-time friends (high cohesion); other groups were composed of unacquainted individuals (low cohesion). Further, some were accorded high respect f...

Two studies examine how people's reactions to conflict resolution efforts by third parties are affected by whether the conflict occurs within or across cultural boundaries. Both test the social categorization hypothesis of the relational model of authority: that third party decisions will be evaluated more strongly through judgments about the treat...

The research literature in organizational justice has examined in some detail the dynamics and consequences of justice judgments based on direct experiences with fair and unfair authorities, but little is known about how people form justice judgments on the basis of reports of injustice by others or how group discussion changes justice judgments. T...

T. R. Tyler and E. A. Lind (1992) identified 3 relational variables that make authoritative procedures seem fair: indications of status recognition, trust in benevolence, and neutrality in decision making. In Study 1, students from the United States, Germany, and Hong Kong recalled a conflict and reported their reactions. In Study 2, U.S. and Japan...

This study compares how taxpayers and their representatives judge the procedural fairness of tax audits. Taxpayers (N=70) and their representatives (N=70) participated in interviews after the completion of their tax audits and were asked to describe their impressions of the audit and auditor and to rate how satisfied they were with the treatment an...

On the basis of fairness heuristic theory, the authors provide an explanation of the frequently replicated fair process effect (the finding that perceived procedural fairness positively affects how people react to outcomes). The authors argue that, in many situations, people may find it difficult to assess whether their outcome is fair or unfair an...

In explaining cultural styles of conflict resolution, a cultural value theory posits that different cultural groups are oriented toward different goals, while a cultural instrumental theory posits that the style is a set of response tendencies which people have learned to maximize rewards within a certain social structure. Episodes of between- and...

Social conflict appears to be a ubiquitous feature of human interaction. Many theoretical and empirical threads in social psychology predict or demonstrate how conflicts arise and how they escalate. The author discusses how people manage to avoid conflict in the many social situations in which it might arise but does not. The answer lies in the psy...

Gender differences in treatment and in judgments of distributive and procedural justice were examined. Three hundred nine litigants who had been involved in arbitrated auto negligence lawsuits responded to exit surveys. Two mechanisms by which gender might influence justice perceptions were explored. First, we examined whether a “chivalry bias” mig...

The present study extends earlier research on procedural unfairness by assessing subjects' reactions to a procedural change before they learn about the outcome of the changed procedure. Subjects performed a series of four tests. After three tests, the procedure to calculate the test scores was changed into a procedure that was very inaccurate or sl...

The diversity of American society raises concern. about whether authorities can maintain social cohesion amid competing interests and values. The group-value model of jus- rice suggests that authorities function more effectively when they are perceived as fair (e.g.. benevolent, neutral, and re spectful). However, such relational evaluations may be...

A description of early work on the fairness heuristic model, an explanation of how and why people use fairness to decide whether and when they will trust groups and authorities.

African American, Hispanic American, Asian American, and European American students rated their procedural preferences in response to a hypothetical conflict scenario and then recalled a real dispute in which they had been involved. Subjects of all four ethnicities and of both genders preferred persuasion and negotiation to other options. There wer...

Zusammenfassung Neue Forschungen zur Psychologie der Verfahrensgerechtigkeit legen es nahe, daß traditionelle Vorstellungen über Gerechtigkeit, die auf die Gerechtigkeit der Allokation von Ergebnissen abheben, nicht damit in Übereinstimmung sind, wie Menschen tatsächlich über Gerechtigkeit denken. Daten einer Studie über Gerechtigkeitsbewertungen i...

Two studies examined how litigants' evaluations of the outcome and process of lawsuits affected their judgments about the fairness of procedures and their acceptance of awards from court-ordered arbitration. The studies tested predictions concerning the operation of a "fairness heuristic"-that procedural justice judgments mediate the effects of pro...

This chapter focuses on one particular aspect of authoritativeness: voluntary compliance with the decisions of authorities. Social psychologists have long distinguished between obedience that is the result of coercion, and obedience that is the result of internal attitudes. Opinions describe “reward power” and “coercive power”, in which obedience i...

The past fifteen years have seen the development of a considerable research literature on the social psychology of procedural justice (see Lind & Tyler, 1988, for a review). Procedural justice research reveals some serious shortcomings in the exchange theories that have traditionally dominated Western analyses of the social psychology of groups, an...

This chapter has two goals. First, it examines the past decade of research on procedural justice. Our goal in that examination is to discuss the major issues which have been of concern to procedural justice researchers. Second, it explores recent developments in the procedural justice field which suggest the issues that will dominate procedural jus...

A comparison of the procedural justice judgments of attorneys and those of lay people judging the same procedures offers an opportunity to generate new information on what factors affect judgments of fairness. In a survey of reactions to conventional and innovative procedures in a United States district court, attorneys and lay people involved in t...

179 undergraduates took part in a study of the effects of instrumental and noninstrumental participation on distributive and procedural fairness judgments. In a goal-setting procedure, Ss were allowed voice before the goal was set, after the goal was set, or not at all. Ss received information relevant to the task, irrelevant information, or no inf...

This paper examines the effects of group membership on group members' concerns about justice. Two types of effects are hypothesized to exist: inclusionary and exclusionary. Inclusionary effects involve the relationship between groups and their members. Exclusionary effects involve the relationship of groups to nonmembers. Data from a recent study o...