Relative deprivation and referent cognitions: Distributive and procedural justice effects

Abstract

In the terms of referent cognitions theory, high-justification procedures are those sufficiently appropriate to inhibit resentment regardless of the outcomes they produce. With low-justification procedures, however, resentment is predicted to increase the more unfavorably actual outcomes compare with those that would have resulted from using other procedures instead. The ordinary-context conditions of an experiment in which subjects had been instructed that their responses were used merely to index typical reactions to experiments produced such results. But within endorsement-context conditions in which subjects thought their responses were used to determine whether their experimenter would be hired as someone placed in charge of conducting research subjects expressed uniformly greater resentment in the low-justification conditions than in the high-justification conditions regardless of how favorable their outcomes might have been otherwise. The results are discussed in terms of reasons why the appropriateness of procedures sometimes becomes a predominant concern.