People Judge Discrimination Against Women More Harshly Than Discrimination Against Men – Does Statistical Fairness Discrimination Explain Why?

Previous research has shown that people care less about men than about women who are left behind. We show that this finding extends to the domain of labor market discrimination: In identical scenarios, people judge discrimination against women more morally bad than discrimination against men. This result holds in a representative sample of the US population and in a larger but not representative sample of Amazon Mechanical Turk (Mturk) respondents. We test if this gender gap is driven by statistical fairness discrimination, a process in which people use the gender of the victim to draw inferences about other characteristics which matter for their fairness judgments. We test this explanation with a survey experiment in which we explicitly hold information about the victim of discrimination constant. Our results provide only mixed support for the statistical fairness discrimination explanation. In our representative sample, we see no meaningful or significant effect of the information treatments. By contrast, in our Mturk sample, we see that providing additional information partly reduces the effect of the victim’s gender on judgment of the discriminator. While people may engage in statistical fairness discrimination, this process is unlikely to be an exhaustive explanation for why discrimination against women is judged as worse.

Governance Quality, Fairness Perceptions, and Satisfaction with Democracy in Latin America

ABSTRACTHow do individuals’ fairness judgments affect their political evaluations? This article argues that when citizens perceive high levels of distributive unfairness in society, they will be less satisfied with the way democracy functions. Yet good governance—that is, impartiality in the exercise of political authority—should mitigate the negative influence of perceived distributive unfairness on satisfaction. Using a cross-national analysis of 18 Latin American countries from 2011 to 2015, this study demonstrates that individuals are significantly less satisfied with democracy when they perceive their country’s income distribution as unfair. Yet good governance significantly offsets this negative relationship, even in a region with the highest level of inequality in the world. These findings imply that policymakers can bolster democratic satisfaction, even in places where citizens perceive the income distribution as fundamentally unfair, by committing to good governance and fair democratic procedures.

Fair design and use of the budgetary process and managerial performance

ABSTRACT This study analyzes the impacts of the fair design and use of the budgetary process, from the perspectives of formal and informal justice, on fairness judgments, on budgetary participation, and on managerial performance. Complementarily, it also analyzes the mediating effect. Research on the impacts of budgetary participation on managerial performance presents conflicting and inconclusive evidence. The studies on organizational justice, in turn, mainly focus on individual perceptions of justice, from a descriptive and perceptual perspective, not considering the normative approach, and treating justice rules and fairness judgments as synonymous. That segregation is relevant as it reinforces the importance of the fair design and use of the budgetary process, going beyond considering individual fairness judgments. The research revealed that the fair design and use of the budgetary process influence managerial performance; however, the individual perception of justice (fairness judgments) did not exert a direct influence. These findings are relevant because they highlight the impacts of justice in terms of the effects that a system generates, not only considering individual perceptions. A survey was conducted with a random sample of 110 managers chosen using the LinkedIn social network. For the data analysis, the structural equations modeling technique was applied. The study contributes to the literature that examines behavioral aspects of the relationship between budgetary participation and managerial performance, by seeking to understand in which conditions budgetary participation results in better performance. In this research, these relationships are analyzed in light of the foundations of justice, from the perspective of justice rules and fairness judgments. The evidence suggests that budgetary participation affects managerial performance when it results from the fair design and use of the budgetary process.

Multidimensional Fair Fuzzy Equilibrium Evaluation of Housing Expropriation Compensation from the Perspective of Behavioral Preference: A Case Study from China

With the rapid development of urbanization, substantial land areas and houses are expropriated, which can cause huge numbers of disputes related to expropriation compensation. The root of the disputes is that the associated subjects are affected by various behavioral preferences and make different cognitive fairness judgments based on the same compensation price. However, the existing expropriation compensation strategies based on the market value under the assumption of “the economic man” hypothesis cannot meet the fairness preference demands of the expropriated. Therefore, finding a compensation price that satisfies subjects’ multidimensional fairness preferences, including profit-seeking, loss aversion, and interactive fairness preferences, is necessary. Only in this way can the subjects reach an agreement regarding fair compensation and resolve their disputes. Because of the fuzziness of subjects’ expected revenues, this paper innovatively introduces trigonometric intuitional fuzzy numbers to construct one-dimensional and multidimensional fair fuzzy equilibrium evaluation models. The Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to an Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) method is adopted to convert a multidimensional problem into a multiattribute group decision problem, which simplifies the problem of finding multidimensional equilibrium when considering the multidimensional fairness preferences of the two subjects. Real case data are introduced to verify the validity of this method. The research results show that upward revision of the multidimensional fairness preferences based on the market value assists in achieving a fair compensation agreement. Consideration of the influence of the subjects’ multidimensional fairness preferences on the fairness equilibrium is conducive to resolving the disputes, and provides a reference for the settlement of expropriation compensation disputes in developing countries.

The Effects of Justice Judgments on Police Legitimacy Across Urban Neighborhoods: A Test of the Invariance Thesis

The invariance thesis posits that the effects of procedural justice judgments on police legitimacy beliefs are consistent across a variety of contexts, including urban neighborhoods. An alternative argument, one steeped in the relational model of authority, holds that procedural justice effects are weaker in high-crime communities where residents do not identify with the police and where they place more weight on instrumental concerns. This study used survey data from 1,000 adults in Ljubljana, Slovenia. The regression models showed that the association between procedural justice and police legitimacy was stronger in low-risk neighborhoods. In high-risk areas, distributive justice was a stronger correlate of legitimacy. Overall, the findings highlight how neighborhood context can moderate the influence of fairness judgments on supportive beliefs.

Debt perceptions: fairness judgments of debt relief for individuals and countries

This study examines how moral intuitions toward debt relief vary depending on whether a debt contract involves one country borrowing from another country or an individual borrowing from a bank. Participants respond to a vignette describing a basic debt dispute between a debtor and a lender. A judge in charge of settling the dispute decides to allow debt relief and participants express how fair they find the decision. Treatments vary (1) the debt context (international or person-bank), (2) the responsibility of lenders and debtors (whether their situations stem from bad luck or poor choices) and (3) whether a lender's profit motive is made salient. Results show that, across both international and person-bank debt, debt relief is perceived as being fairer when debtors are unlucky and when lenders are careless; profit salience, however, does not affect the perceived fairness of debt relief in either debt context. Results, when integrated with those from an initial related study, also point to anti-bank sentiment increasing the perceived fairness of debt relief when an individual borrows from a bank and to a consistent across-context ranking of the perceived fairness of debt relief in the scenario.