Procedural justice, overaccommodation, and police authority and professionalism: results from a randomized experiment

Abstract

Two well-established theories have been used as a foundation for studying how interpersonal treatment affects police-citizen relations: procedural justice and communication accommodation theory. Both theories highlight communication with the public as among the most central duties of a law enforcement officer. Yet research has found that there may be a nonlinear relationship between level of accommodation and positive behavioral outcomes. In this laboratory-style experiment, participants were randomly assigned to one of three experimental conditions to test the effects of three communication styles on perceptions of officer authority/professionalism and of the authority/professionalism of the police more generally. The results show that a procedurally just style of communication results in greater perceived authority/professionalism of the police than a neutral style, while overaccommodation causes the officer to be perceived as having less authority/professionalism. These results take another step in integrating procedural justice theory and communication accommodation theory and speak to the practical effects of communication styles on how people view the police.