Effects of "Voice" and Peer Opinions on Responses to Inequity

Southern Methodist UniversityTwo experiments investigated the effects of "voice" (participating in allocationdecision making by expressing one's own opinion about the preferred alloca-tion) on responses to an inequitable allocation. In addition to subjects' (femalecollege students) either having or not having voice, Experiment 1 manipulated(a) whether the allocation made by a "decision maker" (supposedly anothersubject but actually the experimenter) was or was not biased (due to self-interest) and (b) whether the subject did or did not learn that a "co-worker"believed the allocation to be inequitable. Experiment 2 (with female high schoolstudents) manipulated the presence or absence of voice and involved only aself-interested decision maker; also, a note from a co-worker either supportedthe decision maker's allocation or confirmed the subject's opinion that the allo-cation was inequitable. In both experiments, the impact of voice was mediatedby knowledge about the co-worker's opinion. When subjects had no knowledgeof the co-worker's opinion (Experiment 1) or knew that the co-worker's opinioncoincided with the decision maker's allocation (Experiment 2), there was evi-dence for a "fair process effect": Voice subjects expressed greater satisfactionthan those with no voice.How do people know that they have beentreated fairly? According to equity theory(Adams, 1965; Walster, Berscheid, & Wal-ster, 1973), a distribution of outcomes is con-sidered fair (equitable) if the ratio of out-comes to inputs is constant across people.Apart from considerations of equity, however,fairness judgments may also be affected bywhether a distribution is the result of an ac-ceptable decision-making procedure (see thedistinction between distributive and proce-dural justice in Folger, 1977; Leventhal,1976; and Thibaut & Walker, 1975). Deutsch(1975), in discussing how "injustice of deci-sion-making procedures" affects the percep-tion of justice, makes the following argument:"There is much social psychological research

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