Relying on accessibility experiences in procedural fairness judgments

This paper presents empirical evidence corroborating the idea that procedural justice judgments are not only based on the accessible content information about the procedure, but also on accessibility experiences that accompany the accession of content about the procedure. Four experiments support the hypothesis that people judge a selection procedure in accordance with their subjective experiences of ease or difficulty, that is fairer, the more difficult the recall of unfair aspects felt. The influence of the accessibility experience on the procedural justice judgment is hereby moderated by dispositional self-uncertainty (Experiment 2), experimentally induced uncertainty (Experiment 3) and accuracy motivation (Experiment 4). Implications for the conceptualization of procedural justice judgments are discussed.