Roots of Procedural Fairness

This area will contain information (draft papers, etc) about my research on the nature and roots of procedural fairness. Also see information about my other papers.

Abstract

We propose that human concern for procedural fairness is rooted in two senses: (1) a desire for social stability and (2) an opposition to abuse of power. This resolves the puzzle of how an apparently naturally selected human characteristic could arise when the conditions for it have existed for less then a few thousand years. The extent to which people are concerned about procedural fairness varies predictably with these two senses, as do tendencies toward authoritarianism, egalitarianism and anarchism. We test our hypotheses in two studies, one conducted with the participation of 205 undergraduate students in the U.S.A. and the other in a Taiwanese company with the participation of 60 employees. We found consistent support for our hypotheses in both of these studies.

What is available here

Related papers

Several of my other papers may be closely related to this, including:

Virtues of Omission: Distinguishing two types of OCB
Another paper which studies organizational citizenship behavior and also involves an east Asian sample
Two types of fairness
My work on conservation during the California electricity crises demonstrates to importance of distinguishing multiple motives for cooperation, including two types of fairness concenrs
Other work that touches upon evolutionary psychology

Version: $Revision: 1.4 $
Last Modified: $Date: 2004/06/22 16:42:44 $ GMT
First established September 8, 2003
Author: Lívia Markóczy