JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY 21, f9-29 (1985) Apparent Impropriety and Procedural Fairness Judgments E. ALLAN LIND AND ROBIN I. LISSAK University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Received July 21, 1982 Variation in decision making and allocation procedures has been shown to affect judgments of the fairness of the procedure and its outcome, but such effects have always been studied in the context of properly enacted procedures. It was hypothesized that the appearance of impropriety in the enactment of a fair procedure would increase the extent to which the procedure is judged in terms of its outcome. One hundred twenty undergraduate males and females were placed in the role of either defendant or observer with respect to an adversary procedure trial. Appearance of impropriety was manipulated during the trial by either including or not including evidence of a friendly personal relationship between the judge and the plaintiff’s lawyer. The defendant was said to have either won or lost the case. A significant impropriety x outcome interaction on ratings of procedural fairness, unqualified by higher order effect, supported the hypothesis: a favorable outcome increased and an unfavorable outcome decreased the fairness of the procedure more when the impropriety was present. Discussion focuses on the implications of these findings for future investigation and theory on procedural justice and for practical issues. o 1985 Academic Press, Inc. The study of procedural justice addresses the psychological consequences of procedures governing social decision making. A major area of research in procedural justice has been the study of perceived fairness. Manipulation of decision-making procedures has been shown to affect perceptions of the fairness of the procedure, termed procedural fairness, and perceptions of the fairness of the outcome, termed distributive fairness (e.g., Folger, 1977, Houlden, 1981, LaTour, 1978; Lind, Kurtz, Musante, Walker, & Thibaut, 1980; Walker, LaTour, Lind, & Thibaut, 1974; Walker, Lind, & Thibaut, 1979). Variation in perceptions of procedural fairness in turn This study was supported by a University of Illinois Research Board Grant to the first author and by SSHRCC and FCAC doctoral fellowships to the second author. The authors are grateful to Don Conlon, Pam Buswell, Pam Kirsh, Mara Pawlowski, and Peggy Aman for their assistance in the experiment. Requests for reprints should be addressed to Allan Lind, Department of Psychology, University of Illinois, 603 E. Daniel, Champaign, IL 61820. 19 0022-1031/85 $3.00 Copyright 0 1985 by Academic Press, Inc. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.