Kees van den Bos

Utrecht University | UU · Department of Psychology and School of Law

Financial redress for victims of occupational diseases can be offered through no-fault compensation schemes. No-fault compensation schemes have an explicit mission in promoting perceived fairness and justice. The objective is to offer a quick, fair and just procedure and outcome, while preventing civil court procedures and restoring trust. However,...

The climate crisis calls for radical action, but what drives people to engage in climate protest? We recruited respondents during protests of Extinction Rebellion in the Netherlands and examined how intentions to engage in normative action (e.g., protest march), moderate nonnormative action (e.g., roadblock), and openness to more extreme nonnormati...

Facing the looming threat of the climate crisis, climate movements using strategies of nonviolent civil disobedience have recently attracted attention. To better understand what drives such groups to protest possibly in law-violating ways, we conducted qualitative interviews among 106 people involved with Extinction Rebellion in the Netherlands. Th...

Background While prior studies have established a close association between the use of social network sites (SNSs) and materialistic values, there is limited understanding of the mediating and moderating mechanisms related to important self-related processes, such as self-control and self-acceptance. This paper explores whether and how these factor...

One reason why the COVID‐19 pandemic presented a challenge to public health is that individuals struggled to adhere to virus protective behaviors, such as physical distancing. To aid understanding why people engaged in distancing practices, we investigated the role of threat perceptions and the moralization of physical distancing. We collected long...

The Fair Process Effect aims to shed light on why there are so many instances of distrust, polarization, and conspiracy thinking in our world and what we can do about this. The book focuses on the fair process effect as a mechanism that may help to start overcoming these important issues of societal discontent. This is a positive effect that people...

Facing the looming threat of the climate crisis, climate movements using strategies of nonviolent civil disobedience have recently attract attention. To better understand what drives such groups to protest possibly in law-violating ways, we conducted qualitative interviews among 106 people involved with Extinction Rebellion in the Netherlands. Thes...

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...

Recent research describes how procedural fairness can be used to resolve issues related to ethnic-cultural matters. The central finding in this strand of literature is that when minority members experience procedurally fair treatment by societal actors regarding ethnic-cultural issues, this will lead to a range of outcomes that are beneficial for s...

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...

Five experiments (total number of judging participants = 1309, four different kinds of stimulus materials with a total of 464 messages, total number of judgements = 19,634) investigated the influence of personal uncertainty on the process of lie detection in social relationships. Building on and extending basic assumptions of uncertainty management...

An important prerequisite for democratic societies to function smoothly is that citizens put trust in the law and as such trust the judges in their country. Therefore, whether various participants actually trust the law is an important topic in many different studies. The current paper notes that insights into trust in law among lower educated part...

Sociale veiligheid Tweede Kamer nog onvoldoende geborgd 17 april 2023 Onderzoekers van de Universiteit Utrecht hebben in opdracht van de Voorzitter en Griffier de sociale veiligheid in de Tweede Kamer onderzocht. In het eindrapport Kracht zonder Tegenkracht concluderen zij dat de sociale veiligheid van ambtenaren, fractiemedewerkers en Kamerleden...

We examined how observers assess information-poor allegations of harm (e.g., “my word against yours” cases), in which the outcomes of procedurally fair investigations may favor the alleged perpetrator because the evidentiary standards are unmet. Yet this lack of evidence does not mean no harm occurred, and some observers may be charged with decidin...

Although many studies have examined various aspects of terrorism, relatively little is known about risk indicators associated with specific types of terrorist offences. To partly fill this void, this study explores differences on risk indicators of the Violent Extremism Risk Assessment tool (VERA-2R) between 21 Jihadist offenders who were convicted...

Most research on the development of personality traits like the Dark Triad (i.e., narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy) focuses on local effects like parenting style or attachment, but people live in a larger society that may set the stage for any local effects. Here we paired nation-level data on the traits from 49 nations with several mi...

Managing negative situations is a critical task for managers and organizations, especially since doing so effectively is imperative for “creating a better world” (Academy of Management, 2021). However, there are numerous obstacles that can challenge managers. Our symposium gathers an international panel of scholars from Austria, Belgium, Canada, Fi...

Organizations play a key role in maintaining employee wellbeing. Some research suggests that one way to protect employee wellbeing is to treat them fairly (procedural justice), especially when fair job outcomes (distributive justice) cannot be ensured. Yet, previous studies have not consistently found this interaction effect between distributive an...

The current paper aims to provide insight into judges’ perceptions of how fairly they treat litigants and how important case outcomes are to litigants, and whether these perceptions relate to litigants' perceptions of procedural justice and outcome importance. Respondents were litigants involved in bankruptcy, landlord-tenant, and administrative la...

Social network sites (SNSs) allow young people to experiment with and present different aspects of themselves during important periods of self-concept development. Interestingly, whether SNSs have negative or positive effects on self-concept clarity (SCC) is inconclusive. We propose that SNS use may simultaneously produce negative and positive effe...

In this manuscript, we introduce a theoretical model of climate radicalization that integrates social psychological theories of perceived unfairness with historical insights on radicalization to contribute to the knowledge of individuals’ processes of radicalization and non-radicalization in relation to climate change. We define climate radicalizat...

In this chapter, we introduce key research on social justice from an interdisciplinary social scientific perspective, focusing on questions of what (distributive justice), how (procedural justice) and who (recognition and scope). After discussing seminal theories on distributive justice (i.e., equity theory and relative deprivation), we introduce t...

This study aims to put perceived procedural justice to a critical test in the context of Dutch criminal court hearings. To that end, we surveyed 198 criminal defendants to examine whether their perceptions of procedural fairness were significantly associated with trust in judges and intentions to protest against judicial rulings, among other variab...

In this article, we review the psychology of religion and radicalization. In doing so, we note that both macro-level approaches (that study structural conditions in society) and micro-level approaches (that focus on psychological coping and personal appraisal of individual conditions) fail to adequately explain radical behavior of members of extrem...

Dit verkennende rapport bestudeert copycatgedrag bij terroristische aanslagen. Dit betreft gedrag dat iemand intentioneel en gemotiveerd vertoont om een bepaalde voorganger na te apen, met name een andere persoon of groep die met een terroristische aanslag in (sociale) mediaberichten de aandacht heeft getrokken. Kenmerkend aan dergelijk copycatgedr...

Objectives Providing detailed information about sentencing reduces punitive attitudes of laymen (the information effect). We assess whether this extends to modest information treatments and probe which specific informational types matter most. In addition to previous studies, we include affective measures and trust in judges. Methods In four surve...

Acting on one’s moral principles is not always easy. Upholding one’s moral beliefs may run counter to one’s social environment or situational demands. It may often cause people to remain silent on their convictions, while at the same time some may show the moral courage to speak out. How do people evaluate those who do stand up, and how does it aff...

For entrepreneurs in financial distress, it is of vital importance that investors and bankers accurately assess the viability of their business, free of unwanted biases that bear no relevance to the assessment of the chance of survival. Despite the prevalence of entrepreneurs facing financial distress, little research has yet investigated the role...

The European Database of Terrorist offenders (EDT) is based on comprehensive judicial information of convicted or deceased terrorist offenders, including social, psychological and psychiatric reports. This new empirical database is the result of a European cross-border collaboration between judicial organizations and scientists within the European...

Intolerance of uncertainty (IU) is a transdiagnostic vulnerability factor for emotional disorders. Inspired by Construal Level Theory, the present research investigated the possibility that future time perspective (FTP) might be linked to lower levels of IU. After all, future-oriented construals can lead people to place more weight on long-term goa...

The literature on meaning has recently been enriched by Baumeister’s and von Hippel’s evolutionary account delineating why nature selected human minds to use meaning. This is an important contribution to the fascinating study of meaning. Here we aim to complement the Baumeister and von Hippel article by arguing that humans engage in psychological p...

Radicalization and violent extremism leading to violent protests, repression, and terrorist attacks constitute important issues in our world. Social psychological group processes and intergroup dynamics play a key role in creating resilience against or facilitating the path towards violent extremism. The present body of work brings together and fur...

Following a corporate disaster such as bankruptcy, people in general and damaged parties, in particular, want to know what happened and whether the company's directors are to blame. The accurate assessment of directors’ liability can be jeopardized by having to judge in hindsight with full knowledge of the adverse outcome. The present study investi...

Online businesses collect a wealth of data on customers, often without properly informing them. Increasingly, these data are used for behavioral price discrimination. In this two-study article, we explore how consumers would respond if businesses were compelled to disclose their use of discriminatory behavioral pricing techniques. Using different d...

Qualitative interviews with one hundred defendants in Dutch criminal cases examine whether perceived procedural justice is a relevant concern for defendants, and, if so, which procedural justice components they refer to. The study provides a point of epistemological departure from the quantitative studies dominating the field, as it assessed which...

Abstract Objectives: The Dark Triad traits (i.e., narcissism, psychopathy, Machiavellianism) capture individual differences in aversive personality to complement work on other taxonomies, such as the Big Five traits. However, the literature on the Dark Triad traits relies mostly on samples from English-speaking (i.e., Westernized) countries. We bro...

The Dark Triad (i.e., narcissism, psychopathy, Machiavellianism) has garnered intense attention over the last 15 years. We examined the structure of these traits’ measure—the Dark Triad Dirty Dozen (DTDD)—in a sample of 11,488 participants from three W.E.I.R.D. (i.e., North America, Australia & Oceania, Western Europe) and five non-W.E.I.R.D. (i.e....

On the premise that individuals are inclined to self-enhance, in temporal self-appraisal (TSA) theory it is suggested that people can motivationally reconstruct subjective distances from their past self to serve that goal. However, given the mixed evidence found in an East Asian cultural context (i.e., Japan), it is important to test the cultural a...

This article reviews the relationship between people's perceptions of unfairness and their tendencies to think, feel, and act in radicalizing ways. Various theories of radicalization processes are reviewed that examine key aspects of the psychology of perceived unfairness. The review shows that experienced group deprivation and perceived immorality...

On behalf of the mayor of Arnhem, an interdisciplinary research team of Utrecht University evaluated the local anti-radicalization program in the city of Arnhem. The report maps the social network and contacts between the local partners, measures the knowledge and skills of the street-level professionals involved, and evaluates the the inter-organi...

Big Five Personality and in relation to effectiveness self-rating and rating by commander, depression and homesickness in 335 conscripted, active-duty military personnel. Conscientiousness was related to both effectiveness ratings, stability to depression and stability, extraversion and openness all contributed independently to homesickness.

This paper examines the hypothesis that litigants' perceived procedural justice is positively associated with their trust in judges. We argue that although this association might seem quite robust, it can vary across contexts. In particular, we suggest that the nature and magnitude of the association between procedural justice and trust in judges d...

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...

This article focuses on the psychological process of radicalization and proposes a model that examines when people stop accepting the status quo and instead start embracing alternative social systems, unconventional worldviews, and countercultural norms and associated organizations. Specifically, complementary to earlier approaches, the article put...

Justice is one of the central values in people’s lives. Being treated fairly and treating each other with respect are important principles for many. Yet, in everyday life people are confronted with injustice and innocent victims on a regular basis. Reactions toward victims can range from going to great lengths to help or support the victims to hars...

This study tests whether individuals' reliance on ease-of-retrieval processes when forming procedural justice judgements are moderated by informational and personal uncertainty. In Studies 1 and 2 we examined the predicted effects of informational uncertainty. Results indicated that participants in information-uncertain conditions relied on ease-of...

In this paper we discuss some strengths, stumbling blocks, common mistakes, and controversial issues that can be important when conducting experiments in the legal domain. To this end, we first briefly introduce the experimental method and note some of its strengths when used in legal research projects. We also briefly discuss important differences...

How do people evaluate potentially good and desirable behavior by others? We investigate how participants (N = 154) evaluate a couple that wants to adopt an orphan that would otherwise die. We collected data from heterosexual Christians in two cities in the Dutch Bible belt. We manipulated whether the adoptive-parents-to-be were a heterosexual coup...

This chapter studies psychological processes that may underlie people’s justice concerns. The psychological processes the chapter examines include both social-cognitive and motivational processes. In particular, the chapter discusses a two-phase model of self-interest and justice concerns, rationalistic and experiential paths to blaming of innocent...

This article presents the cross-cultural validation of the Entitlement Attitudes Questionnaire, a tool designed to measure three facets of psychological entitlement: active, passive, and revenge entitlement. Active entitlement was defined as the tendency to protect individual rights based on self-worthiness. Passive entitlement was defined as the b...

This article presents the crosscultural validation of the Entitlement Attitudes Questionnaire, a tool designed to measure three facets of psychological entitlement: active, passive and revenge entitlement. Active entitlement was defined as the tendency to protect individual rights based on self-worthiness. Passive entitlement was defined as the bel...

Reactions toward innocent victims can range from harsh derogatory reactions to great effort to alleviate the victims’ ill fates. Using insights from research on just-world theory and perspective taking, the current paper investigates both negative and positive reactions toward innocent victims. Specifically, we propose that self-focused versus othe...

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...

ForewordBy Tyler G. OkimotoCoordinating Editor. Correspondence: t.okimoto@business.uq.edu.au.In 2014, Riël Vermunt released his landmark book, The good, the bad, and the just: How modern men shape their world (Ashgate), an accomplishment that coincided with his receipt of the Lifetime Achievement Award in 2014 from the International Society for Jus...

The present study examines the congruence of individuals' minimum preferred amounts of voice with the prospect theory value function across nine countries. Accounting for previously ignored minimum preferred amounts of voice and actual voice amounts integral to testing the steepness of gain and loss functions explicated in prospect theory, we use c...

This paper uses cross-cultural comparisons and comparisons obtained by experimental manipulation to examine how cultural and contextual factors influence responses to personal and group relative deprivation. Two studies were conducted, one in an individualistic country (The Netherlands) and one in a collectivistic country (Singapore). One way to ex...

Reactions to decisions are shaped by both outcome and procedural fairness. Moreover, outcome and procedural fairness interact to influence beliefs and behaviors. However, different types of “process/outcome” interaction effects have emerged. Many studies have shown that people react particularly negatively when they receive unfair or unfavorable ou...

The present study examines the congruence of individuals’ minimum preferred amounts of voice with the prospect theory value function across nine countries. Accounting for previously ignored minimum preferred amounts of voice and actual voice amounts integral to testing the steepness of gain and loss functions explicated in prospect theory, we use c...

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...

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...

In this article we review the basic assumptions and findings of terror management theory. Then we discuss some problems with those assumptions and findings. We note, for example, that the theory is not falsifiable, that theorists have not done a good job of integrating conflicting empirical findings, and that attempts to explain all of human behavi...

On the basis of findings obtained from students samples from 27 countries (N = 6192) applicability of three-dimensional entitlement model on individual and cultural level were tested. In the article we present theoretical model allowing for cross-cultural comparisons of entitlement attitudes and its relations to socio- economic development of societ...

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...

Morele confrontaties, waarin men geconfronteerd wordt met een morele weigeraar die weigert een gedrag uit te voeren dat men zelf wel heeft gedaan, hebben vaak negatieve gevolgen. Verminderen deze negatieve gevolgen wanneer men het eens is met de (pro- of anti-homo) waarden waar de weigeraar zich op beroept?

Extremism in society is the source of enormous human suffering and represents a significant social problem. In this article, we make a case for the urgency of understanding the psychology of societal extremism, discuss the diverse forms that extremism can take, and identify uncertainty as a correlate of and quite possibly precondition for extremism...

In this study among Dutch Muslim youth (N = 131), we focus on the process of radicalization. We hypothesize that this process is driven by three main factors: (a) personal uncertainty, (b) perceived injustice, and (c) perceived group threat. Using structural equation modeling, we demonstrate that personal uncertainty, perceived injustice, and group...

We investigated how people respond to moral threats and the consequences this has for one's moral self-concept. In two experiments, participants first tasted a sausage and were then confronted with a bogus participant who had refused to taste the sausage because of moral or non-moral reasons. People disliked the moral refuser more than the non-mora...

This paper proposes a method to study cross-cultural differences with experimental control. We illustrate this method by examining how participants from India (a high power distance culture) and the Netherlands (a low power distance culture) react to being allowed or denied an opportunity to voice their opinions. We argue that one way to evaluate t...