Fair Process Effect
Running head: FAIR PROCESS EFFECT
Humans Making Sense of Alarming Conditions:
Psychological Insight into the Fair Process Effect
Kees van den Bos
Utrecht University
Chapter published in 2015 in
R. S. Cropanzano & M. L. Ambrose (Eds.),
Oxford handbook of justice in work organizations.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Keywords: fair process effect; treatment fairness; human reactions; sense making; alarm
system; informational value; organizational behavior; human resource management
Author Notes:
I thank Maureen Ambrose, Russell Cropanzano, and Liesbeth Hulst for their
comments and suggestions on an earlier draft of this chapter.
Address correspondence to Kees van den Bos, Department of Social Psychology,
Utrecht University, Heidelberglaan 1, 3584 CS Utrecht, The Netherlands. E-mail:
k.vandenbos@uu.nl.
1
Fair Process Effect
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Abstract
This chapter examines the psychology of the fair process effect, which is defined as the
positive effect that people's perceptions of experienced treatment fairness have on their
subsequent reactions. The chapter argues that when people are confronted with potentially
problematic events or personal uncertainty-provoking experiences, this signals to them that
something alarming may be going on that warrants their attention. As a result, the individuals
involved are likely to engage in psychological processes of trying to make sense of what is
going on and what they should expect will be happening. Because perceived procedural
fairness has important informational value for people, it follows that people are susceptible to
issues of treatment fairness in many alarming or sense-making triggering situations. The
current chapter describes this alarm-system perspective on the psychology of the fair process
effect and discusses implications of this perspective for our understanding of organizational
behavior and human resource management.
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Humans Making Sense of Alarming Conditions:
Psychological Insight into the Fair Process Effect
In this chapter, I focus on the psychology of the fair process effect, the positive effect that
people's perceptions of procedural fairness (also referred to in this chapter as experienced
treatment fairness1) have on their subsequent reactions (Folger, Rosenfield, Grove, & Corkran,
1979; Van den Bos, 2005; Walker, LaTour, Lind, & Thibaut, 1974). A central outcome of the
research that I will review in the chapter is that an important reason why this effect is so
robust and so prevalent in many different situations is because the experience of fair
treatment serves important functions in processes of sense-making. That is, when people are
confronted with events such as economic problems, reorganization processes, potential layoffs (Brockner, 2010), but also more general personal uncertainty-provoking experiences
(Van den Bos, 2001a), this signals to them that something potentially alarming may be going
on that warrants their attention (Van den Bos, Ham, Lind, Simonis, Van Essen, & Rijpkema,
2008). As a result, the individuals involved are likely to engage in sense-making and social
appraisal processes in order to make sense of what is going on and what they should expect
will be happening (Van den Bos & Lind, 2013; Weick, 1995).
Because perceived procedural fairness has important informational value for people
(Hulst, Van den Bos, & Akkermans, 2013; Lind, 2001; Van den Bos, 2001b), it follows that
people are susceptible to issues of treatment fairness in many alarming or sense-making
triggering situations (Van den Bos & Lind, 2009), especially when they are interacting with
supervisors, management, or other social authorities (Lind, 1995; Tyler & Lind, 1992; see
also Weick, 1995). Therefore, information that conveys fair treatment by authorities or other
important people will yield various types of positive reactions among the individuals
involved, such as increased organizational commitment, job performance, conflict resolution,
decision acceptance, and job satisfaction (Van den Bos, 2005). In contrast, information that
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indicates unfair treatment instigates all sorts of negative responses, such as increased
retaliation, theft, work stress, overt or covert disobedience, and decreased mental and
physical health (Folger & Cropanzano, 1998).
Thus, a central premise of the current chapter is that perceived procedural or treatment
fairness fulfills important psychological functions for people trying to make sense of their
worlds, especially when they are trying to manage potentially alarming situations in those
worlds. Figure 1 illustrates this alarm-system perspective on the psychology of the fair
process effect. In what follows in this chapter I will define the fair process effect and will
give a brief overview of instances where the effect has been found. I then will go on and
discuss basic psychological insights into the fair process effect. The chapter will end by
drawing some conclusions of these insights for our understanding of organizational behavior
and human resource management.
The Fair Process Effect:
Instances of the Effect and Conceptualizing the Effect
In the organizational justice literature there continues to be some misunderstanding and
ambiguity as to how the term "the fair process effect" should be understood (Van den Bos,
2005). It is important, therefore, to delineate how I think the term should be defined and what
I mean with the term when discussing instances of the effect, basic psychological
mechanisms underlying the effect, and implications of the effect for our understanding of
organizational behavior and more general social behavior. This discussion will necessarily
rely and build on what I said earlier about these issues in my earlier review of the fair process
effect (see Van den Bos, 2005).
A review of the fair process effect should start with the 1974 experiment by Walker,
LaTour, Lind, and Thibaut. This experiment was the first procedural justice study that
revealed a fair process effect. The experiment investigated the effects of adversary and
Fair Process Effect
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inquisitorial procedures on the reactions of disputants toward either a favorable or an
unfavorable verdict in a simulated court trial. Adversary and inquisitorial procedures differ
on multiple dimensions, but the key distinction that Thibaut and Walker were interested in is
that adversary procedures allow people involved in court trials greater levels of control over
the process used in the court trial than inquisitorial procedures do. Findings of the Walker et
al. study indicated that defendants judged the way in which they had been treated to be more
fair when they had experienced the adversary procedure than when they had been subjected
to the inquisitorial procedure. These effects are interpreted to reflect that, compared to
inquisitorial procedures, adversary procedures allow people greater levels of process control
(Thibaut & Walker, 1975, 1978) and more opportunities to voice their opinions (Folger et al.,
1979). More important for the current purposes is that the findings also revealed a fair
process effect such that participants judged their verdict to be more fair and were more
satisfied with the verdict in case of the fair (adversary) procedure as opposed to the unfair
(inquisitorial) procedure.
Building on the Walker et al. (1974) findings, Folger and colleagues (1979) were the
first to come up with the term "the fair process effect." Extending on Hirschman's (1970)
conception of voice, Folger et al. re-interpreted the procedural justice findings presented by
Thibaut and Walker cum suis, and suggested that getting the opportunity to present evidence
supporting one's own case in a court trial has a strong positive effect on the defendant's
reactions toward the verdict. Folger et al. (1979) tested their line of reasoning by
manipulating whether participants in an experimental set-up either received or did not receive
an opportunity to voice their opinions about how the experimenter should divide lottery
tickets between participants themselves and the other participants. As predicted, findings
revealed a fair process effect such that voice procedures resulted in higher ratings of overall
satisfaction than no-voice procedures.
Fair Process Effect
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Following the pioneering studies by Walker et al. (1974) and Folger et al. (1979) as
well as the groundbreaking review of the psychological literature on procedural justice by
Lind and Tyler (1988), many positive reactions have been reported of employees who felt
they had been treated in a fair way by their management or their organization. These positive
reactions include higher commitment to organizations and institutions (Folger & Konovsky,
1989; Korsgaard, Schweiger, & Sapienza, 1995; McFarlin & Sweeney, 1992; Moorman,
1991), more extra-role citizenship behavior (Konovsky & Folger, 1991; Podsakoff &
MacKenzie, 1993), greater likelihood of conflict prevention and resolution (Bobocel, Agar,
Meyer, & Irving, 1998), better job performance (Lind, Kanfer, & Earley, 1990), more
widespread acceptance of company policy (Greenberg, 1994; Lind, 1990) and supervisor
directives (Huo, Smith, Tyler, & Lind, 1996), higher levels of job satisfaction (Folger &
Cropanzano, 1998), and more positive emotional feelings (Weiss, Suckow, & Cropanzano,
1999). In contrast, when employees perceive that they have been treated in an unfair way they
are more likely to leave their jobs (Alexander & Ruderman, 1987), are less likely to
cooperate (Lind, 2001), show lower levels of morale and higher levels of work stress and
overt and covert disobedience (Huo et al., 1996), are more likely to initiate lawsuits (Lind,
Greenberg, Scott, & Welchans, 2000), and may even start behaving in anti-social ways
(Greenberg, 1993, 1997; Greenberg & Lind, 2000).
In other social contexts than organizations the fair process effect as defined here
yields reliable and important effects on human reactions as well. For example, the belief that
one has been treated fairly by judges, the police, or other social authorities enhances
acceptance of legal decisions (Lind, Kulik, Ambrose, & De Vera Park, 1993), obedience to
laws (Tyler, 1990), more positive evaluations of public policies (Lind, 1990; Tyler, Rasinski,
& McGraw, 1985), and more trust in government (Van den Bos & Van der Velden, in press),
whereas the belief that one has been treated unfairly has been shown to prompt protest
Fair Process Effect
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behavior (Vermunt, Wit, Van den Bos, & Lind, 1996) and recidivism among spouse abuse
defendants (Paternoster, Brame, Bachman, & Sherman, 1997). Indeed, what makes the fair
process effect so important is that the effect has been shown on a wide variety of human
responses (for overviews, see, e.g., Lind & Tyler, 1988; Van den Bos, 2005).
I want to emphasize explicitly that the definition of the fair process effect that is used
in this chapter is that the effect refers to the positive effect that people's perceptions of
treatment fairness have on their subsequent reactions. Thus, treatment fairness is a term I use
here to signify the fairness of how people are treated. This term refers not only (or primarily)
to the perceived fairness of formal procedures, but also (or especially) to the fairness people
experience in interactions with other persons. I am proposing, therefore, that the perceived
fairness of interpersonal treatment is what is driving large parts of what has become known in
the literature as the fair process effect.
Following my take on the fair treatment effect it is important to specify what I think
researchers often mean when they refer to the concept of procedure. The terms "procedure"
and "procedural justice" are derived from the law literature and especially from the 1975
work by social psychologist John Thibaut and law professor Lawrence Walker. These authors
and their colleagues were inspired by the psychological differences they saw between
different legal procedures, and in their pioneering procedural justice experiments they took
these differences as starting point for their investigation of participants' reactions toward
procedures that varied the amount of process control that participants experienced in
simulated court trials. Thus, Thibaut and Walker (1975) combined their mutual interests in
social psychology and law and as a result they placed their studies under the heading of
"procedural justice" research. However, this should not be taken too literally, since these
authors clearly saw their experiments as a first step toward understanding the psychology
involved in fairness and justice issues (Thibaut & Walker, 1978) and were intrigued by the
Fair Process Effect
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implication of their findings that how people are treated in courts of law can have strong
impact on their reactions to judges' verdicts (Walker et al., 1974).
Following the pioneering research by Thibaut and Walker (1975, 1978), scientists
have deepened our understanding of the psychological processes hinted upon in this earlier
work (e.g., Folger et al., 1979; Folger, 1986; Greenberg, 2000; Greenberg & Folger, 1983;
Lind & Tyler, 1988; Tyler & Lind, 1992; Van den Bos & Lind, 2002) and rightfully noted
that the psychological processes involved in the Thibaut and Walker simulations could be
adequately expanded to incorporate how people react to fairness and justice in other contexts
than legal settings. Most notably, the role of procedural justice in the workplace was
recognized to be very important (Colquitt, Conlon, Wesson, Porter, & Ng, 2001; Greenberg,
2000; Greenberg & Folger, 1983; Moorman, 1991). Even more important for the current
purposes, during the 1975-1985 advancement of research and theory on procedural justice it
became clear that what by then had become known as procedural justice effects were really
effects of how fairly people felt they had been treated in the particular context under
investigation (for an overview, see, e.g., Lind & Tyler, 1988).
In correspondence with this latter observation, the fair process effect research that is
reviewed in this chapter is about the effect of the fairness of the way in which people feel
they have been treated in the workplace or elsewhere. Thus, "procedural fairness" and
"procedural justice" as they are being used here, and as I think that John Thibaut really
intended it to be, refer to the way people are treated. So, in essence, fair or unfair treatment in
interpersonal and social interactions is the issue here. This is also the reason why in this
chapter I equate the fair process effect with an effect of fair treatment. Indeed, it may be more
accurate to refer to the "fair process effect" as the fair treatment effect.
It is important to note that this conception of procedural justice overlaps to some
extent with a notion that was developed later in the organizational justice literature, the
Fair Process Effect
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concept of "interactional justice" (see, e.g., Bies & Moag, 1986; Bies & Shapiro, 1987). One
could argue that a danger of using the procedural justice label is that it may be a bit of a
misnomer and that people may wrongfully misinterpret the concept to mean to refer to
formal, law-like procedures. The interactional justice label has as an advantage that it clearly
refers to the justice and fairness aspects of social interactions that are so important in
understanding the majority of the fairness effects reported in the psychological literature.
The main disadvantage of "international justice," however, is that when, in addition to
the two earlier developed notions of distributive and procedural justice, researchers start
using this concept they have to redefine the concept of procedural justice. That is, because of
the obvious overlap of interactional justice with informal procedural justice (Tyler & Bies,
1990), introducing the concept of interactional justice forces researchers to start redefining
procedural justice in terms of formal decision-making procedures. In the modern
organizational justice literature there is a strong tendency to do this. However, this formal
aspect was never meant to be important in the work by the founders of procedural justice. On
the contrary, they were really referring to the more informal way in which people were
treated in decision-making processes. It is this latter conception, the fairness of informal
treatment, that I think the literature should focus on (for a similar argument, see Tyler & Bies,
1990), and I will refer to this by means of the notions that were originally developed for these
effects: procedural justice (Thibaut & Walker, 1975) and the fair process effect (Folger et al.,
1979).
Thus, the term "fair process" in organizational justice should be used to refer
primarily to the informal way in which people are treated in decision-making processes, and
not (or not only) to formal procedures. Formal aspects of procedures may have a role in the
fair process effect, but the fairness of the informal ways in which people are treated by other
persons is what is really driving the large part of the effect. Therefore, treating the concepts
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of "procedural justice" and "the fair process effect" in formal ways, as opposed to informal
ways, would be a major error.
I should emphasize that I am not stating that perceived procedural justice or treatment
fairness should be equated with perceptions of distributive justice. Research has shown
clearly that procedural justice or treatment fairness have quite different effects than
distributive justice has (Lind & Tyler, 1988). Furthermore, it is often or typically the
combined effect of procedural and distributive justice that yield precise and important insight
into organizational behavior (Brockner, 2010; Brockner & Wiesenfeld, 1996).
I also would like to note that thus far there is not a good scale that always will reliably
measure the fair process effect or will assess people's procedural or treatment fairness
perceptions in valid ways. This noted, recent evidence suggests that the Moorman (1991)
scale might be a very good scale to measure experienced procedural justice in organizations
(Miller, Konopaske, & Byrne, 2012), especially when items are tailored to fit the
organization where the study is conducted and also fit the employees' experiences accurately
(Lind & Tyler, 1988). It would be important for the progress in organizational justice if future
studies would come up with a reliable scale of the fair process effect as defined here.
Interesting in this respect is that Miller et al. (2012) recently examined the criterionrelated validity of two commonly used measures of organizational justice Colquitt, 2001;
Moorman, 1991). To this end, the authors conducted a dominance analysis on the threedimension measure of organizational justice by Moorman (1991) versus the four-dimension
measure of Colquitt (2001) in the prediction of Colquitt’s own outcomes. Results suggested
that Moorman’s measures may dominate Colquitt’s measures on some outcomes. These
findings need further replication in different samples and different work settings, but when
replicated suggest that renewed consideration should be given to Moorman’s scales, as it
appears that this three-factor measure of organizational justice may outperform the four-
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factor measure in at least some instances. More generally, Miller et al. note that Moorman’s
parsimonious representation of justice may be more useful than Colquitt’s version for
explaining the nuances of perceptual differences regarding fairness and justice in the
workplace. Clearly, attention is warranted to sort out the implications of this very interesting
research as it may help to come up with a robust scale that reliably measures procedural and
other justice perceptions in many different work settings.
It is also important to note here that a precondition before fair process effects can
occur is that the experience of a particular procedure leads to the perception of a certain level
of procedural fairness. It is this procedural fairness perception that influences the person's
subsequent reactions and in this way creates a fair process effect. Thus, for example, when
individuals get an opportunity to voice their opinions about the way in which tasks will be
distributed among employees in their department, the individuals involved may perceive the
way in which they have been treated as fair. This perception of procedural fairness may then
lead the department members to be more satisfied with the final decision of exactly how task
assignments are distributed among them. The label "the voice effect" should be reserved,
therefore, for the enhancement of procedural fairness when a procedure allows people a
chance to express themselves and "the fair process effect" is the enhancement of people's
evaluations, attitudes, behaviors, and other reactions following this procedural fairness
perception. Thus, in contrast with what sometimes is done in the literature, a voice effect
should not be equated with a fair process effect (Van den Bos, 2005). Rather the experience
of voice, or encountering an accurate, a consistent, or any other particular procedure
(Leventhal, 1980; Van den Bos, Vermunt, & Wilke, 1996, 1997) can affect people's fairness
perceptions and these perceptions are a prerequisite before fair process effects can be found.
Making a clear distinction between voice and fair process effects is also important because
Fair Process Effect
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different psychological processes may be driving voice versus fair process effects (Van den
Bos, 2001a; Van den Bos, Maas, Waldring, & Semin, 2003; Van den Bos & Miedema, 2000).
I think it is important to highlight the importance of the role of perceptions in the
fair process effect. Fairness and justice as psychologists study these concepts are really in the
eye of the beholder (e.g., Adams, 1965; Lind et al., 1990; Mikula & Wenzel, 2000; Tyler,
Boeckmann, Smith, & Huo, 1997; Van den Bos & Lind, 2002). Although it might be possible
to derive rational-normative principles of procedural justice and although it might be possible
to come up with an objective fair process effect (see, e.g., Hare, 1981; Rawls, 1971; see also
Jasso, 1994, 1999), I argue that the fair process effect in essence is a psychological effect,
constructed in the head of the recipient of the procedure. Thus, the psychology of the fair
process effect examines how fairness and justice judgments are constructed by people. This
implies that objective conditions that researchers, organizational behaviorists, and employers
think are fair or unfair do not have to viewed that way by employees and other recipients of
the procedure under consideration.
I also would like to emphasize the importance of the concept of fairness in our
understanding of "the fair process effect" and the larger literature on "organizational justice."
That is, compared to the related notions of justice and morality, fairness better connotes the
subjective, ready judgment that is and has long been the true topic of psychological study
(Van den Bos & Lind, 2002). Related to this, participants and respondents in research studies
typically find it easier and more relevant to provide judgments of fairness than judgments of
justice or morality. This is the reason that most psychologists in our field usually ask people
to rate fairness rather than to rate justice or morality (cf. Tyler & Lind, 1992). This is also a
main cause of why morality researchers often use "good" or "bad" judgments or "thumbs up"
or "thumbs down" judgments as their dependent variables (e.g., Greene, Sommerville,
Nystrom, Darley, & Cohen, 2001). These variables may be conceptually related to judgments
Fair Process Effect
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of what is moral and immoral but obviously are very different from what Kant (1785) and
other rationalist moral philosophers (Beauchamp, 2001) are focusing on. Returning to the fair
process effect, these considerations constitute the rationale why the central topic of
consideration of this chapter is called "the fair process effect" and not "the just process effect"
or "the moral process effect." The former simply reflects better both common research
practices and the core belief under study. An implication of this observation is that although
organizational psychologists usually call this area "organizational justice," we are in effect
referring to fairness perceptions as the major antecedent of the effects we are interested in
(Lind & Van den Bos, 2002; Van den Bos & Lind, 2009).
Related to this is the concern whether what usually is called the fair process effect
should be really conceived of as a fair process effect or that it would it be more accurate to
start talking about an unfair process effect instead (cf. Greenberg & Folger, 1983). Whereas
the former perspective is in line with how the effect generally is known, the latter view
corresponds with observations that unfair events affect lay people's cognitions and reactions
stronger than fair events (Brockner & Wiesenfeld, 1996; Folger, 1984; Van den Bos &
Spruijt, 2002; Van den Bos & Van Prooijen, 2001; Van den Bos et al., 1997). This finding is
probably caused by the important role that people's expectations have in the psychology of
fairness judgments (e.g., Van den Bos et al., 1996) and the fact that unfair events may
strongly violate these expectations (Van den Bos & Van Prooijen, 2001). The psychological
mechanism behind this finding may well be an instance of the more general negativity effect
that indicates that negative things typically have a bigger impact on psychological processes
than positive things (see, e.g., Fiske & Taylor, 1991; Peeters & Czapinski, 1990). Thus,
unfairness in fact may play a more prominent role and it may be better to focus on the
psychology of unfairness as opposed to fairness (Folger & Cropanzano, 1998). In the current
chapter, I will use the traditional term "the fair process effect," with the understanding that,
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unless explicitly stated otherwise, this may involve the effects of both fair and unfair
procedures on people's reactions.
Psychological Insight into the Fair Process Effect:
Alarming Conditions and Sense-Making Processes
Many studies have reported fair process effects in many different contexts using different
research methods. The effect has been observed most often within the organizational context
(Lind & Van den Bos, 2002), but has frequently been found elsewhere as well (e.g.,
Paternoster et al., 1997; Vermunt et al., 1996). Furthermore, an exciting aspect of research on
the effects of procedural fairness perceptions is that effects of these perceptions have been
found on very different human reactions (Lind & Tyler, 1988). This is important because it
suggests that fair process studies may have substantial implications for a multitude of
domains of human and organizational behavior (Greenberg, 2000). Because fair procedures
enhance so many important cognitions, feelings, attitudes, and behaviors, insight into what is
responsible for the fair process effect is crucial for understanding how people think, feel, and
behave in their social and organizational environments (Cropanzano & Folger, 1989, 1991;
Cropanzano & Greenberg, 1997; Greenberg, 2000; Folger & Konovsky, 1989; Greenberg,
1990, 1993; Lind & Tyler, 1988; Tyler & Lind, 1992). To this end, this chapter will examine
the psychology of the fair process effect.
Different psychological explanations of the fair process effect exist in the
organizational justice literature. These include instrumental explanations of the effect (see,
e.g., Shapiro & Brett, 2005; Thibaut & Walker, 1975, 1978; Walker, Lind, & Thibaut, 1979),
which emphasize the amount of control procedures give people over the outcomes they hope
to get. Other explanations focus on processes of social influence (e.g., Greenberg & Folger,
1983) and note that the fair process effect can be explained in terms of people being
Fair Process Effect
15
susceptible to influence via social comparison of others' opinions about whether certain
outcome distributions are fair or unfair (Folger et al., 1979).
Yet another important account of the fair process effect points at the role of referent
cognitions in explaining and understanding the effect (Cropanzano & Folger, 1989; Folger,
1986, 1987, 1993; Folger & Baron, 1996; Folger & Skarlicki, 1998). Referent cognitions
theory tends to focus on unfair procedures and argues that experiences of procedural
unfairness are psychologically so meaningful to people because when a procedural rule is
broken people's thinking people use a frame of reference for evaluating what happened that
consists of a mental comparison to what might have happened instead. In contrast, relational
models focus on experiences of fair procedures. Relational models argue that fair treatment
by authorities signals that important persons in your society or organization value and respect
you and therefore treat you with dignity and respect (Lind & Tyler, 1988; Tyler & Lind, 1992).
Instrumental, social influence, referent cognitions, and relational models have been
reviewed and discussed earlier (see, e.g., Folger & Cropanzano, 1998; Tyler & Lind, 1992;
Van den Bos, 2005). Here I concentrate on a more recent psychological explanation of the
effect that perhaps has the potential to integrate many aspects of the earlier proposed
explanations. That is, the alarm-system perspective on the fair process effect argues that
people show positive reactions to fair treatment because being treated fairly gives them a way
to cope with alarming circumstances. The alarm-system account explains people's negative
responses to unfair treatment by pointing out that being treated unfairly constitutes an
alarming experience in itself (Van den Bos et al., 2008; Van den Bos & Lind, 2009).
The alarm-system explanation focuses on how people make sense of alarming
experiences, such as economic problems, reorganization processes, and potential lay-offs, but
also flashing lights, exclamation points, and personal uncertainty-provoking experiences
(Van den Bos et al., 2008; Van den Bos & Lind, 2009). The alarm-system perspective on the
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fair process effect is inspired by an earlier body of research that shows that people react more
vigilantly to issues of treatment fairness when they are coping with personal uncertainty (Van
den Bos & Lind, 2002, 2009). One of the first studies on uncertainty and the fair process
effect was a series of experiments published in 2001. In these experiments, half of the
participants were asked to think about, and write a description of, the emotional experiences
they feel when they encounter uncertainty in their personal lives (Van den Bos, 2001a). The
other half of the participants thought about and wrote about the emotional experiences
involved in their watching television, an issue which does not salientize personal uncertainty
among the population of university students where we conducted our studies. In a later,
ostensibly unrelated study, the same participants were exposed to standard procedural
fairness manipulations: In some of the experiments this involved participants, after
completing a task in which they worked with another person, either being or not being
allowed to voice their views about how much they should be paid relative to the other
participant. In another experiment, participants were informed that in a selection process in
which they took part either all (accurate procedure) or only some (inaccurate procedure) of
their test items would be taken into account. These voice and accuracy manipulations are
common procedural fairness manipulations, reliably leading those who do not receive voice
or who experience inaccurate procedures to feel they have been unfairly treated and those
who receive voice or are accurately treated to feel they have been fairly treated.
The principal dependent variable in the Van den Bos (2001a) experiments was the
participants' ratings of positive or negative affect toward the way they were treated. The
results support the uncertainty salience hypothesis proposed in the article: When personal
uncertainty had been made salient, the fair procedures resulted in more positive and less
negative affect whereas the unfair procedures yielded more negative and less positive affect
than was the case when uncertainty had not been made salient. In other words, when personal
Fair Process Effect
17
uncertainty was salient, the fair process effect (Van den Bos, 2005) on participants' affective
treatment ratings was magnified.
Other fairness studies have found similar effects not just for the salience of personal
uncertainty, but also for real experienced personal uncertainty (Maas & Van den Bos, 2011)
and for stable individual differences in uncertainty orientation in organizational contexts or
other important real-world situations (see, e.g., Elovainio et al. 2005; Kausto, Elo, Lipponen,
& Elovainio, 2005; Patterson, Cowley, & Prasongsukarn, 2006; See, 2009; Thau, Aquino, &
Wittek, 2007). Devon Proudfoot and Allan Lind talk more about these and other uncertainty
findings in their chapter in this volume. Here I would like to note that the implication of what
I have discussed thus far seems to be that there is something about personal uncertainty that
makes people to react more strongly and more vigorously toward fair and unfair events.
An important way to understand these research results is provided by the idea that
personal uncertainty often leads people to react more strongly toward fair and unfair events
because being uncertain or being reminded about things one is uncertain about often
instigates strong affective-experiential processes (Maas & Van den Bos, 2009). Thus, the idea
is that experiencing feelings of uncertainty would lead people to start processing information
they subsequently receive in experiential-intuitive ways (Epstein & Pacini, 1999).
Cognitive-experiential self-theory distinguishes between two conceptual systems that
people use to process information, namely the experiential-intuitive and the rational-cognitive
systems (Epstein & Pacini, 1999). The experiential way of processing information is
intuitive, preconsciously encoding information into concrete images or metaphors, and
making associative connections. In experiential modes, events are experienced passively, and
people can be seized by their emotions. The rationalistic way of processing information, on
the other hand, is analytic, encoding information in abstract ways, based on making logical
cause-and-effect connections, and requiring intentional, effortful processing. In rationalistic
Fair Process Effect
18
modes of information processing, people experience events actively and consciously while
thinking things over and making justifications for what happened in these events, and in these
modes people are in control of their thoughts.
Cognitive-experiential self-theory also assumes that the operation of experiential
mindsets is intimately associated with affect-related experiences (see, e.g., Epstein & Pacini,
1999). If experiential mindsets do indeed make people's fairness reactions more susceptible to
affect-related processes, then the intensity with which people react affectively to daily life
events (Larsen, Diener, & Cropanzano, 1987) should interact with people's mindsets. Earlier
fairness studies had shown that individual differences in affect intensity can moderate
people's fairness reactions (Van den Bos et al., 2003). Integrating this line of work with
cognitive-experiential self-theory, Maas and Van den Bos (2009) predicted that under
conditions of uncertainty, individual differences in affect intensity (Larsen, Diener, &
Emmons, 1986) would moderate people's fairness reactions, especially when they have been
primed with experiential (as opposed to rationalistic) modes of information processing.
To test these predictions, Maas and Van den Bos (2009) brought people in either
experiential or rationalistic mindsets. To this end, we developed a manipulation that varied
the mindsets (experiential or rationalistic) people are in, such that people react more based on
their gut feelings when in experiential mindsets and more deliberately when in rationalistic
mindsets. After thus having been brought in either experiential or rationalistic mindsets,
participants responded to procedures that allowed them opportunities to voice their opinions
or that denied them such opportunities (Maas & Van den Bos, 2009, Study 2). As predicted,
the findings reported showed that people who had been primed with experiential mindsets
and who score high on the affect intensity scale (Larsen et al., 1986) reacted more strongly to
fair and unfair events (compared to those who had been brought in rationalistic mindsets
and/or who scored low on affect intensity). These findings suggest that focusing on the
Fair Process Effect
19
combination of affective and experiential processes is important for the social psychology of
uncertainty effects reported in the literature. Affective and experiential reactions may be
more likely in alarming conditions in which people are trying to assess frantically what to do
and how to behave. It is to a discussion of this alarm-system based work that I now turn.
The alarm-system perspective on the justice judgment process argues that the
affective-experiential effects that are found under conditions of uncertainty (Maas & Van den
Bos, 2009) occur because experiencing feelings of personal uncertainty constitutes an
alarming experience (Van den Bos, Ham, et al., 2008). Specifically, in this line of research
we examined a possible connection between, on the one hand, the augmentation of fairness
effects in the presence of personal uncertainty (e.g., Van den Bos, 2001a; Van den Bos,
Poortvliet, Maas, Miedema, & Van den Ham, 2005) and other self-threatening conditions
(Miedema, Van den Bos, & Vermunt, 2006) and, on the other hand, related phenomena in
social cognition and social neuroscience showing the possible existence of a "human alarm
system" (Eisenberger, Lieberman, & Williams, 2003).
In the literatures on close relationships and on social neuroscience, it has been
suggested that personal uncertainty and self-threats lead to the activation of the "human alarm
system," a psychological system that people use to detect and handle alarming situations and
that prompts people to process more alertly what is going on in the situations in which they
find themselves. For example, Murray, Holmes, and Collins (2005) suggested that personal
uncertainty and felt insecurity in close relationships activate the human alarm system with the
result that people process more alertly what is happening in their relationships.
Along similar lines, Eisenberger et al. (2003) have argued that being ostracized or
experiencing other self-threatening events activates parts of the human brain that Eisenberger
et al. have labeled the “human alarm system.” The alarm system is responsible for detecting
cues that might be harmful to survival and, after activation, for recruiting attention and
Fair Process Effect
20
coping responses to minimize threat. Eisenberger et al. (2003) have argued that experiencing
social exclusion or other self-threatening events may be an experience of social pain. Like
physical pain, the experience of social pain may trigger the human alarm system, "alerting us
when we have sustained injury to our social connections" (Eisenberger et al., 2003, p. 292).
From an evolutionary perspective, the working of such an alarm system would be adaptive:
An activated alarm system prompts the human organism to act and respond more quickly or
otherwise more alertly to what is going on in the organism's environment; this in turn makes
the survival of the organism more likely.
One way to triangulate the relationships linking personal uncertainty, the human
alarm system, and the fairness literature is to conceptualize an overlap between the alarm
system and the fairness judgment process. An intriguing hypothesis that can be derived from
such a postulated overlap is that factors that people associate with alarming conditions would
be expected to enhance the sensitivity of the alarm system and thus, given the postulated
overlap, potentiate sensitivity to the fairness-related events people subsequently experience.
So, just as Eisenberger and Lieberman (2004) postulated that the brain bases of social pain
are similar to those of physical pain and hypothesized that "factors that enhance the
sensitivity to one type of pain should enhance the sensitivity of this alarm system and thus
potentiate sensitivity to the other type of pain as well" (p. 297). In our 2008 article, my coauthors and I postulated that presenting alarm-related symbols to people would activate the
human alarm system and hence potentiate sensitivity to other types of processes associated
with it as well, including enhanced sensitivity to the fairness judgment process. This would
be expected to make people react more sensitively to subsequently experienced fair or unfair
events (Van den Bos et al., 2008).
More specifically, the literature reviewed thus far suggests two conclusions in line
with this analysis: (1) personal uncertainty and other self-threatening conditions activate the
Fair Process Effect
21
human alarm system (Eisenberger et al., 2003; Murray et al., 2005); (2) personal uncertainty
and self-threatening conditions lead to more extreme fair process effects (Miedema et al.,
2006; Van den Bos 2001a; Van den Bos et al., 2005). Thus, we now know that the same
conditions that are thought to activate the human alarm system, might also lead to more
extreme fairness effects. Given this observation, we proposed that activating the human alarm
system directly, by presenting alarm-related stimuli to people, would lead to more extreme
reactions toward fair and unfair events.
Thus, an intriguing hypothesis that follows from the alarm-system perspective is that
the presentation of cues that are closely, even subtly, related to alarming conditions might
lead people to form more extreme judgments about subsequently presented fair and unfair
events. Findings of various experiments (scenario studies, an experiential experiment, and
fMRI testing) in fact provided evidence for this line of reasoning (Van den Bos et al., 2008;
Van den Bos & Rijpkema, 2008). Specifically, we found that viewing large exclamation
points prior to responding to accurate or inaccurate procedures and voice or no-voice
procedures indeed made people react more extremely to the procedures. Similar effects were
also found on participants' reactions to good versus bad outcomes, suggesting that an alarmsystem perspective on fairness reactions applies not only to the fair process effect but to fair
outcome effects as well (Van den Bos, 1999). The overlap between reactions to procedural
and distributive justice has been discussed elsewhere as well (see, e.g., Ambrose & Arnaud,
2005; Ambrose & Schminke, 2009; Cropanzano & Ambrose, 2001; but see also Brockner,
2010; Brockner & Wiesenfeld, 1996).
Another experimental study replicated and extended these findings. Participants in
this study were people from various parts of the Netherlands, with different educational
backgrounds, and from different age groups, who were interviewed in a shopping area of a
medium-sized city located in the middle of the Netherlands. Specifically, people who were
Fair Process Effect
22
walking in the shopping area of the city center of Amersfoort were asked whether they would
like to participate in a study on how people process information and which would take a
maximum of 10 minutes of their time. Two meters behind the experimenter, an orange
flashing light of 17 x 14 x 14 centimeters of the sort used on emergency vehicles had been
placed on a small pedestal of 1 meter high. Both the flashing light and pedestal were
ostensibly unrelated to our study and the flashing light was connected by means of an electric
cable of 1.5 meters long to a large store (Vroom & Dreesmann; a Dutch equivalent of
Macy's). As our alarm-related manipulation, the flashing light had been switched on for half
of the participants and the flashing light was off for the other half of the participants.
In this setting, participants responded to scenarios in which they were asked to image
that fair or unfair events happened at their workplace. In accord with the alarm-system view
of the justice judgment process, the findings revealed that when the flashing light had been
switched on people showed more extreme justice judgments in response to variations in good
and bad outcomes than when the flashing light had been switched off. A finding not reported
in the article but that is interesting to note here was that participants also showed more
extreme reactions in response to accurate versus inaccurate procedures when the flashing
light was on as opposed to off.2 Thus, we found similar effects of our alarm manipulation on
both reactions to variations in distributive fairness and procedural fairness, again suggesting
that the alarm-system perspective is not limited to the fair process effect only but to fair
outcome effects as well. More generally, perhaps this is an indication that as our field evolves
our thinking about the fair process effect, the fair treatment effect, and other fairness
judgment processes needs to evolve as well. Perhaps this suggests that "fair process" was a
specific example of a more general phenomenon.
The studies reported in the Van den Bos et al. (2008) paper were in part inspired by
the conjecture that the uncertainty management findings reported in the fairness literature
Fair Process Effect
23
(see, e.g., Van den Bos, 2001a; Van den Bos & Lind, 2002; Van den Bos et al., 2005) might
be explained by the notion that experiences of personal uncertainty often constitute alarming
events to people and that it is this alarm-related component of uncertainty manipulations that
is driving some or perhaps all of the uncertainty effects reported in the social psychological
literature.
Especially interesting in this respect are some findings from functional magnetic
resonance imaging (fMRI) testing (Van den Bos & Rijpkema, 2008). This study showed that
watching an exclamation point leads to a brain activation pattern that shares areas (medial
frontal gyrus, Brodmann area 9) with the brain regions that have been found to be active in
personal moral judgment tasks. These brain areas are known to be sensitive to tapping the
combined effects of cognitive and emotional responses (Greene et al., 2001). This might
indicate that a combination of cognition and emotion best explains how people will form and
respond to fairness and justice perceptions (Van den Bos, Ham, et al., 2008) and make
personal moral decisions (cf. Greene et al., 2001). In other words, the social psychology of
personal uncertainty and fairness judgments may well involve hot cognitive, not cold
cognitive, processes (Van den Bos, 2007).
Figure 1 illustrates the current thinking on the alarm-system perspective on the fair
process effect. Related to other ideas of sense-making in organizations (e.g., Weick, 1995),
the model assumes that issues of treatment fairness serve important functions in processes of
sense-making. Especially when people encounter alarming events such as economic
problems, reorganization processes, potential lay-offs, personal uncertainty-provoking
experiences, and other stimuli, this signals to them that something potentially alarming may
be going on that warrants their attention (Van den Bos et al., 2008). As a result, the
individuals involved are likely to engage in sense-making and social appraisal processes in
order to make sense of what is going on and what they should expect will be happening.
Fair Process Effect
24
Therefore, the model assumes that people will start to look for information about what is
going on and how they should behave and what will be happening in their near future.
Information about fair and unfair treatment may have special importance in these kinds of
situations. In particular, information that conveys fair treatment will calm people down
(Vermunt & Steensma, 2003) and hence deactivate the alarm system. This is assumed to be
associated with strong positive reactions among the individuals encountering the fair
treatment. In contrast, information about unfair treatment will further activate the alarm
system (Van den Bos et al., 2005), resulting in strong negative responses among the
individuals involved.
Conclusions:
Toward an Alternate View on Organizational Behavior
This chapter studied the fair process effect, defined explicitly as an effect of perceptions of
treatment fairness on human reactions. The research reviewed in this chapter shows that
experienced fair treatment has various positive effects on people's reactions, whereas
perceived unfair treatment yields all kinds of negative reactions. A central hypothesis put
forward in this chapter is that the fair process effect is found in so many circumstances on so
many different dependent variables among so many different research participants and
respondents because many people in many different situations are trying to make sense of
what is going on in their immediate environments. This insight fits a growing recognition that
sense-making in organizations and in other social situations makes up an important
component of what people do in the modern world (Van den Bos & Lind, 2013; Weick,
1995). The perception of treatment fairness is assumed to fulfill important functions in these
processes of sense-making (Hulst et al., 2013).
Future research is needed to examine all the implications of the alarm-system model
of the fair process effect and to fill in empirically all the components of the view of the sense-
Fair Process Effect
25
making individual discussed here. For example, issues that should be studied include the
basic psychological mechanisms underlying the fair process effect. This includes the
cognitive fluency with which information pertaining to fair and unfair treatment is processed
in different circumstances (e.g., Winkielman, Schwarz, Fazendeiro, & Reber, 2003). This
also includes identifying the conditions and applied contexts under which the alarm-system
holds particularly well as well as the circumstances in which the model might be less
relevant. Fair process effect may also be contingent on other information people receive, such
as information about their outcomes (Brockner, 2010; Brockner & Wiesenfeld, 1996), and
may depend on the organizational structure in which the fair treatment is experienced
(Schminke, Ambrose, & Cropanzano, 2000). Besides organizational contexts a particularly
relevant situation in which the fair process effect should be studied more intensively is the
courtroom (Lind et al., 1990) and other judicial settings (Lind, Kulik, Ambrose, De Vera Park,
1993; Tyler, 1990; Van den Bos & Van der Velden, in press). Appropriate attention should
also be paid to cross-cultural differences how people respond to fair and unfair procedures
(e.g., Leung, 2005; Van den Bos, Brockner, et al., 2010, 2013).
Thus, many issues need to be studied in future research. This noted, I think that some
of the implications that already follow from an alarm-system perspective on the fair process
effect and a sense-making view on organizational behavior stand in contrast with the view
that humans are primarily interested in material gain and try to achieve this gain by rational
means. A basic assumption underlying the model presented here is that people are individuals
who are frequently busy appraising what is going on in their social surroundings and how to
behave in these surroundings. I argue, therefore, that the Rational-Economic Man view that
one finds so often in the fields of business, economics, law, and elsewhere in society (cf.
Kahneman, Knetsch, & Thaler, 1986) should be replaced or at least complemented by a view
of humans as Social-Appraising Individuals (Van den Bos & Lind, 2013).
Fair Process Effect
26
Of course, I am not denying that some people engage in selfish, exploitative, or even
fraudulent behavior. This noted, although people's primitive core may sometimes (e.g., when
their cognitive capacities have been severely limited) push them in an egoistic direction, it
may well be the case that frequently people try to free cognitive resources to do the right
thing (Van den Bos, Peters, Bobocel, & Ybema, 2006). Thus, I work from the assumption
that fairness is frequently a very real concern to people (Miller, 1999; Miller & Ratner, 1998)
and that people use their fairness perceptions to try to make sense of what is going and how to
behave in appropriate manners (Lind & Van den Bos, 2013; Van den Bos & Lind, 2013). It is
my hope that, with the current chapter, I have contributed a bit to what I see as a modern,
sense-making perspective on organizational behavior and human resource management.
Fair Process Effect
27
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Footnotes
1
In fact, later in this chapter I will argue that "fair treatment" better captures
what we know about the phenomenon than "fair process." This fits with my line of
reasoning that it is important to conceptualize the "fair process effect" more broadly
than sometimes is done in the literature, an issue to which I will return later.
2
These fair process reactions were measured after the dependent variables that
were reported in Experiment 4 of the Van den Bos et al. (2008) paper.
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Figure Captions
Figure 1. An alarm-system perspective on the psychology of the fair process effect.
Note. The model assumes that people try to make sense of alarming events and that
information about fair treatment encountered in processes of sense-making will calm people
down and hence yield positive reactions, whereas information about unfair treatment will
lead to increased activation of the alarm-system and hence instigate negative reactions among
humans.
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