Procedural Justice Judgments Research Articles

Procedural Justice Judgments of Alternative Procedures for Resolving Medical Malpractice Claims1

Procedural justice theorists Thibaut and Walker (1978) asserted that the Anglo‐American adversary process is the most ideal for resolving disputes involving high conflict of interest. Sheppard (1985) asserted that this claim may be premature and argued for the investigation of more complex litigation models in procedural justice research. This survey study examined the procedural justice attributes of five litigation procedures for resolving medical malpractice claims. Three groups of subjects (psychology undergraduates, N= 87; first‐year law students, N= 88; and jury venire persons, N= 65) read written descriptions of the Anglo‐American adversary model, the inquisitorial model, and three hybrid procedures that combine some features of these two basic models. Subjects then rated each model on six procedural justice attributes. Analyses focused on ratings of the adversary model as compared to the three hybrid models. Results indicated that the adversary model was consistently rated higher than the hybrid models on only one procedural justice measure, voice. On the remaining procedural justice measures, the hybrid models were comparable to, and frequently rated higher than, the adversary model. The results are supportive of Sheppard's plea that researchers investigate more complex procedural models, and the findings are considered in light of Lind and Tyler's (1988) plea for the development of hybrid procedures that may optimize both subjective and objective procedural justice outcomes.

Individual and Corporate Dispute Resolution: Using Procedural Fairness as a Decision Heuristic

The research reported in this paper was supported by the National Science Foundation (grants 84-11142 and 85-18597), the American Bar Foundation, and the Institute for Civil Justice of the RAND Corporation. The authors are grateful to Barbara Meierhoefer, Pat Lombard, and the Federal Judicial Center for supplying the Study 2 data, to Ruth Kanfer and Chris Earley for permission to reanalyze data from their study with the first author, and to Tom Tyler, Robert Sutton, Gina Ke, Bob Bies, and Karen Cook for their comments on earlier versions of this manuscript. Two studies examined how litigants' evaluations of the outcome and process of lawsuits affected their judgments about the of procedures and their acceptance of awards from court-ordered arbitration. The studies tested predictions concerning the operation of a fairness heuristic-that procedural justice judgments mediate the effects of process impressions and outcome evaluations on the decision to accept or reject the directives of an authority. Participants in the studies were corporate and individual litigants in federal tort and contract actions that were subject to court-ordered arbitration. In both studies the decision to accept the arbitrator's award or reject it and go to trial was strongly correlated with judgments of procedural justice, and much or all of the effect of outcome evaluations and process impressions on award acceptance was mediated by procedural justice judgments, which had a stronger effect than either subjective or objective measures of the arbitration award. Separate analyses of corporate and individual decision makers in the second study suggested that both groups relied heavily on procedural justice judgments in deciding whether or not to accept the arbitration award. The findings provide evidence of widespread use of a heuristic and support the extension of justice-judgment research to corporate decision making.'

Comparing three processes underlying judgments of procedural justice: A field study of mediation and arbitration.

A natural setting in which 158 coal miners who had filed grievances were assigned to either mediation or arbitration was used to test a model of 3 mediating processes underlying judgments of procedural justice: instrumental, noninstrumental, and procedural enactment. The generality of these processes was tested across procedures varying objectively in the degree of disputants' outcome control, across contexts in which disputes rather than decisions were resolved, and across situations in which the grievance was won, lost, or compromised as a result of the dispute resolution procedure. All 3 processes consistently accounted for judgments of procedural justice in all but 1 of these circumstances (instrumental processes did not account for procedural justice when grievants won)

Comparing three processes underlying judgments of procedural justice: A field study of mediation and arbitration.

Comparing three processes underlying judgments of procedural justice: A field study of mediation and arbitration.

Perspective and procedural justice: Attorney and litigant evaluations of court procedures

A comparison of the procedural justice judgments of attorneys and those of lay people judging the same procedures offers an opportunity to generate new information on what factors affect judgments of fairness. In a survey of reactions to conventional and innovative procedures in a United States district court, attorneys and lay people involved in tort and contract cases were asked to judge the overall fairness of court procedures and the fairness of specific procedures used in arbitration hearings. The respondents were also asked for their judgments concerning the favorability of the procedure's outcome, the opportunity to have the case heard and decided by an impartial third party, and their side's control over what happened in the case, all of which are factors found in previous studies to affect procedural fairness judgments. The results showed that, while attorneys gave higher overall fairness ratings than did litigants, the difference was not affected by the procedure assigned to the case. In addition, attorneys and litigants appeared to use the same standards to evaluate the fairness of procedures, although they disagreed about where the procedures they experienced fell on these dimensions. The theoretical and practical implications of the results are discussed.

Organizational Justice: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

The present article chronicles the history of the field of organizational justice, identifies current themes, and recommends new directions for the future. A historical overview of the field focuses on research and theory in the distributive justice tradition (e.g., equity theory) as well as the burgeoning topic of procedural justice. This forms the foundation for the discussion offive popular themes in contemporary organizational justice research: (a) attempts to distinguish procedural justice and distributive justice empirically, (b) the development of new conceptual advances, (c) consideration of the interpersonal determinants of procedural justice judgments, (d) new directions in tests of equity theory, and (e) applications of justice-based explanations to many different organizational phenomena. In closing, a plea is made for future work that improves procedural justice research methodologically (with respect to scope, setting, and scaling), and that attempts to integrate and unify disparate concepts in the distributive and procedural justice traditions.

In the Eye of the Beholder: Tort Litigants' Evaluations of their Experiences in the Civil Justice System

Little is known about the reactions of tort litigants to traditional and alternative litigation procedures. To explore this issue, we interviewed litigants in personal injury cases in three state courts whose cases had been resolved by trial, court-annexed arbitration, judicial settlement conferences, or bilateral settlement. The litigants viewed the trial and arbitration procedures as fairer than bilateral settlement, apparently because they believed that trials and arbitration hearings gave their case more respectful treatment. They were less satisfied with the outcome of judicial settlement conferences than with the outcome of bilateral settlements, because judicial settlement conference outcomes were more likely to fall below their expectations. In general, procedural justice judgments and outcome satisfaction were little related to objective outcome, cost, or delay; instead the evaluations appeared to be determined largely by perceptions of whether the procedure met litigants' criteria for procedural fairness and expectations on outcomes and costs. Gender, income, and race did not have much effect on evaluations.

The effects of procedural aspects and outcome salience on procedural fairness judgments

The effects of process control and decision control on procedural fairness judgements are examined with regard to the procedure used by commercial banks in granting business credits to entrepreneurs. Male and female entrepreneurs with experience in requests for business credits were interviewed about several aspects of the procedure for granting business credit. Respondents had either a positive or a negative experience with credit granting (i.e., the request was or was not rewarded). The outcome-oriented and the procedure-oriented explanations for the effects of process control on procedural fairness judgments are discussed. The results show that, contrary to expectation, process control had no effect on the procedural fairness judgments. On the contrary, perceived seriousness of treatment, as well as the predicted effects of decision control, did influence procedural justice judgments. Moreover, some support was found for the contention that seriousness of treatment functions as precondition for process control effects (Tyler, 1987). Neither the outcome-oriented, nor the procedure-oriented explanation could fully account for the findings. It is assumed that the specific aspects of the situation are responsible for the results, indicating how important the situational context is in research concerning procedural justice.

What is Procedural Justice?: Criteria Used by Citizens to Assess the Fairness of Legal Procedures

This paper examines procedural justice in the context of citizen experiences with the police and courts. It is based on interviews of 652 citizens with recent personal experiences involving those authorities. I will consider two issues: first, whether the justice of the procedures involved influences citizen satisfaction with outcomes and evaluations of legal authorities; and second, how citizens define “fair process” in such settings. The results replicate those of past studies, which found that procedural justice has a major influence on both satisfaction and evaluation. They further suggest that such procedural justice judgments are complex and multifaceted. Seven issues make independent contributions to citizen judgments about whether the legal authorities acted fairly: (1) the degree to which those authorities were motivated to be fair; (2) judgments of their honesty; (3) the degree to which the authorities followed ethical principles of conduct; (4) the extent to which opportunities for representation were provided; (5) the quality of the decisions made; (6) the opportunities for error correction; and (7) whether the authorities behaved in a biased fashion. I found that the meaning of procedural justice varied according to the nature of the situation, not the characteristics of the people involved.

Conditions leading to value-expressive effects in judgments of procedural justice: A test of four models.

Conditions leading to value-expressive effects in judgments of procedural justice: A test of four models.

Conditions leading to value-expressive effects in judgments of procedural justice: A test of four models.

Conditions leading to value-expressive effects in judgments of procedural justice: A test of four models.