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approach. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.PROCEDURALJUSTICE
This entry focuses on the psychology of procedural
justice (PJ) and the law. PJ is a judgment about the
fairness of the procedures employed to resolve con-
flict. Psychological research shows that PJ enhances
satisfaction with conflict procedures and outcomes
independent of actual dispute outcomes or outcome
fairness. Among the procedural criteria that enhance
fairness are having one’s say, neutrality, benevolence,
and respect—an effect that occurs in legal contexts
across cultures. Research has shown that procedural
fairness effects are diminished and outcome effects
are enhanced when outcomes are favorable or when
they pose threats to central moral values. The psychol-
ogy of retributive justice concerns the fairness of
responding to rule violations or legal infractions. PJ
research can assist in the evaluation of alternative dis-
pute resolution procedures, such as mediation and
restorative conferences.Procedural Justice and the Law
The earliest research on the psychology of fairness
focused on people’s beliefs as to whether the out-
comes of their conflict were fair. This distributive jus-
tice research was the first to conduct empirical tests of
the proposition that people’s satisfaction with the res-
olution of conflict is influenced by outcome fairness
rather than exclusively by outcome favorability—a
proposition that dates to Aristotle. Although the origi-
nal demonstrations of distributive fairness effects
on satisfaction were not conducted in legal settings,subsequent research established the importance of
outcome fairness for people’s satisfaction with the
resolution of conflicts in legal settings as well. For
example, a study of felony defendants found that their
belief that their sentence was fair was a better predic-
tor of their satisfaction with the outcome of their case
than was the duration of their incarceration.
The first systematic research concerning the psy-
chology of procedural fairness was conducted by John
Thibaut, a professor of psychology, and Laurens Walker,
a professor of law. Their seminal work led them to
theorize that disputants’ satisfaction with the resolu-
tion of their conflicts was influenced by the fairness of
the conflict resolution procedures as well as the fair-
ness of the outcomes produced by those procedures.
Furthermore, they proposed that beliefs about proce-
dural fairness were influenced by the manner in which
control was distributed between disputants and poten-
tial third parties in litigation procedures (e.g., auto-
cratic, adversarial, or negotiation procedures). Finally,
they asserted that beliefs about procedural fairness
were a critical determinant of litigants’ (and observers’)
procedural preferences and their satisfaction with
legal procedures and outcomes.
Thibaut and Walker’s theory of PJ postulated that
disputant process control and decision control were
critical determinants of procedural fairness and satis-
faction. The adversarial procedure was asserted to
be superior because of its optimal distribution of
control—allocating process control to the litigants or
their lawyers (permitting each party to present evi-
dence on their behalf) and decision control to the
judge (thus ensuring that a decision would be
imposed, even in high-conflict settings). One early
study compared the procedural preferences of under-
graduate students from four countries (France, West
Germany, Britain, and the United States). This study
found the adversarial procedure (common to U.S.
courtrooms) to be perceived as fairer and preferred to
alternative procedures by U.S. residents as well as by
citizens in the European countries where the adversar-
ial procedure is not legally institutionalized and where
judges typically exert a greater degree of process con-
trol than in U.S. courtrooms.
Most important, Thibaut and Walker’s laboratory
research was the first to demonstrate what is referred
to as the fair process effect: that the use of fair proce-
dures enhanced disputants’ acceptance of contested
outcomes. This was a profoundly important finding
for the fields of psychology and law, and it has been
replicated in numerous studies of people engaged inProcedural Justice——— 625P-Cutler (Encyc)-45463.qxd 11/18/2007 12:43 PM Page 625