Procedural fairness in ethnic-cultural decision-making: Benefits, processes and minority and majority group perspectives

ABSTRACT

As nations worldwide diversify, societal institutions are increasingly faced with the challenging task to resolve issues regarding ethnic, cultural, and linguistic matters. In the present contribution, we review evidence for a theoretical model that highlights the relevance of procedural fairness for dealing with such ethnic-cultural issues. Our collective model of procedural fairness (CPF) explains the reactions to fairness enactment of different stakeholders: Minority groups that receive fair treatment, third-party minority groups, and the majority. For minority groups, ethnic-cultural procedural fairness effects emerge through self-categorisation processes, leading to positive leader evaluations and decision acceptance, as well as increased feelings of societal inclusion, well-being, and social trust. For the majority group, CPF holds that responses to ethnic-cultural procedural fairness are driven by higher-order moral standards of rightful conduct towards disadvantaged group members. Taken together, the present contribution accentuates the usefulness of ethnic-cultural procedural fairness as a social engineering tool in diverse societies.

KEYWORDS:

• Procedural fairness
• ethnic and cultural issues
• CPF model
• sociology
• social capital

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The materials, data files, and scripts of additionally reported studies can be accessed via https://osf.io/xpqba/?view_only=541bdb6480ad4f9c98563ad5dd98718b.

Ethics statements

The research was conducted according to the ethical rules presented in the General Ethical Protocol of our faculty

Notes

¹ See Supplementary Online Materials at our Open Science Webpage https://osf.io/xpqba/?view_only=541bdb6480ad4f9c98563ad5dd98718b

² These are reported in detail in the Supplementary Online Materials on our Open Science webpage (https://osf.io/xpqba/?view_only=541bdb6480ad4f9c98563ad5dd98718b), and the study materials, data, and scripts needed to reproduce our analyses can also be found there.

³ See https://aspredicted.org/D4L_YH3.

⁴ See https://aspredicted.org/4QL_ZLP.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Special Research Fund Ghent University [BOF16/GOA/007].