On the psychology of procedural justice: reactions to procedures of ingroup vs. outgroup authorities

Theorizing on procedural justice has assumed that people’s reactions to outgroup authorities are to a large extent based on instrumental concerns. Therefore, attention is primarily directed to outcomes rather than procedures in encounters with outgroup authorities. In the current article we propose that in order for people dealing with outgroup authorities to be strongly affected by procedural fairness, the available outcome information should be ambiguous. Furthermore, we argue that people confronted with an outgroup authority react particularly negatively to unfair procedures that give them negative outcome expectancies. These patterns are not expected in encounters with ingroup authorities. Two experiments support our line of reasoning. The discussion focuses on the implications of these findings for the integration of theoretical perspectives on procedural justice. Copyright # 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Receiving fair treatment from authorities is an important aspect of people’s lives. Ever since the early work by Thibaut and Walker (1975), effects of procedural justice and injustice on people’s judgments and behaviours have been investigated and found in various social settings (for an overview, see Lind & Tyler, 1988). An example of a typical procedural justice effect is the frequently replicated finding that people react more positively to procedures that give them an opportunity to voice their opinion in a decision making process as opposed to procedures that do not give them such an opportunity (e.g. Folger, 1977). For example, voice procedures have been found to positively affect procedural justice judgments, the extent to which people are willing to accept subsequent decisions, and perceptions of people’s relations with authorities (Lind & Tyler, 1988). Overall, the procedural justice literature has provided two explanations to these findings. Thibaut and Walker’s control model (1975) posits that people judge procedures that provide them with some Received 19 May 2003 Copyright # 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Accepted 5 September 2003 *Correspondence to: Tomas Ståhl, Department of Behavioural Science, University of Skövde, PO Box 408, SE-541 28 Skövde, Sweden. E-mail: [email protected] Contract/grant sponsors: Leiden University, The Netherlands; University of Skövde, Sweden. amount of process control as fairer than procedures that do not provide any process control. The argument is that when people have some control over the process they have the opportunity to influence the decision by presenting arguments for their cause, and as a result people have a better chance to get a fair outcome. Thibaut and Walker’s control model can be described as an instrumental model in that procedures are suggested to be important to people to the extent that they are perceived to have implications for their outcomes. The relational model of authority (Tyler & Lind, 1992; cf. Lind & Tyler, 1988) has provided a different explanation for such procedural justice concerns. The relational model suggests that whether or not one has been treated fairly by an authority conveys information about one’s position in the group. Authority treatment is especially important because authorities are seen as group representatives, and hence speak for the entire group. According to Lind and Tyler, fair treatment implies that the recipient is a respected member of the group as well as that the group in which he/she is a member is respectable and has high status. As a consequence, the relational model argues, procedural justice may affect people’s self-esteem and personal identity (Koper, Van Knippenberg, Bouhuijs, Vermunt, & Wilke, 1993). Based on the relational model’s suggestion that fair treatment indicates that one is a respected member of the group and that one has relatively high status, whereas unfair treatment indicates that the recipient is not a respected member of the group and has a low status position, one would expect procedural (in)justice to have the greatest impact on people’s reactions to decisions made in groups that are important for their social identities. For example, because groups in which one is a member should to a larger extent be a part of one’s self-concept than groups in which one is not a member, information about whether or not one is respected by an authority from an ingroup should have stronger implications for one’s social identity than information that one is not respected by an outgroup authority. Thus, because procedural fairness conveys information about respect and status, one would expect stronger effects of procedural fairness on reactions of people dealing with an ingroup authority than on reactions of people dealing with an outgroup authority. Furthermore, one would also expect procedural fairness to have a greater impact on people who identify strongly with the group than on people who identify less with the group. Both these hypotheses have received some support from correlational as well as experimental research (Huo, Smith, Tyler, & Lind, 1996; Smith & Tyler, 1996, 1997; Smith, Tyler, Huo, Ortiz, & Lind, 1998; Tyler & Degoey, 1995, 1996), and have been referred to as the group membership effect (Smith et al., 1998) and the identification effect (Tyler, Boeckmann, Smith, & Huo, 1997) respectively. The aim of the present research is to further explore the psychology of the group membership effect. Whereas the majority of studies on the relationship between group membership and justice focus on differences in reactions to decisions in interpersonal vs. intergroup relations (e.g. Haslam, 2001; Platow, Reid, & Andrew, 1998; Wenzel, 2001), research on the group membership effect focuses on differences in people’s reactions to decisions from ingroup vs. outgroup authorities. In general, the group membership effect seems to imply that people usually do not respond very strongly to procedures when confronted with an outgroup authority (e.g. Smith et al., 1998). In the current article we argue that this is not always necessarily the case, and we investigate conditions under which people confronted with an outgroup authority can be strongly affected by procedures. To do so, we integrate insights of both the relational model (Tyler & Lind, 1992; cf. Lind & Tyler, 1988) and of fairness heuristic theory (FHT), a social-cognitive procedural justice theory aimed at understanding how fairness judgments are formed (e.g. Lind, Kulik, Ambrose, & de Vera Park, 1993; Van den Bos, Lind, Vermunt, & Wilke, 1997; Van den Bos, Lind, & Wilke, 2001). We think that this is important, as integrating group-dynamic and social-cognitive perspectives of procedural justice could further our understanding of the psychology of procedural justice (Van den Bos, Vermunt, & Wilke, 1997). We now introduce our first experiment by presenting some findings from research on FHT. After this, we 174 Tomas Ståhl et al. Copyright # 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Eur. J. Soc. Psychol. 34, 173–189 (2004) integrate these findings with arguments from the relational model presented above and outline the specifics of the present research.