Humans making sense of alarming conditions: Psychological insight into the fair process effect

This chapter examines the psychology of the fair process effect, which is defined as the positive effect that people’s perceptions of experienced treatment fairness have on their subsequent reactions. The chapter argues that when people are confronted with potentially problematic events or personal uncertainty-provoking experiences, this signals to them that something alarming may be going on that warrants their attention. As a result, the individuals involved are likely to engage in psychological processes of trying to make sense of what is going on and what they should expect will be happening. Because perceived procedural fairness has important informational value for people, it follows that people are susceptible to issues of treatment fairness in many alarming or sense-making triggering situations. The current chapter describes this alarm-system perspective on the psychology of the fair process effect and discusses implications of this perspective for our understanding of organizational behavior and human resource management.