Procedural Justice in Bilateral Legal Negotiation

Procedural justice effects have been found in a variety of settings, most of which have included a third-party neutral decision maker or facilitator. This research consists of four studies that explore procedural justice in legal negotiation, where no third-party neutral is present.;First, two correlational studies test the hypothesis that procedural justice plays a role in acceptance of negotiated agreements. Study 1 and Study 2 test the relationship between the fairness of the process used to resolve a dispute, objective monetary outcomes, subjective assessments of outcome favorability, and subjective assessments of outcome fairness. Additionally, Study 2 tests the hypothesis that negotiations characterized by greater procedural justice result in more potential for integrative bargaining. Both Study 1 and Study 2 results suggest that procedural justice encourages the acceptance of negotiated agreements, as well as leading to opportunities for increased integrative bargaining.;Because the first two studies suggest an important role for procedural justice in negotiation, Studies 3 and 4 explore the antecedents of procedural justice judgments in legal negotiation. Study 3 considers this issue through an analysis of the relationship between self-report measures for procedural justice judgments and both self-report measures and video-coded measures of antecedent variables of voice, courtesy and respect, trust, and neutrality. Study 3 results suggest that although all identified antecedent variables play a role in judgments about procedural justice, the primary component relates to courtesy and respect behavior by both the speaker and her partner. Study 4 addresses the question of how much negotiation partners agree on what constitutes procedurally just behavior. Study 4 suggests that parties share some agreement about courtesy and respect behavior and trust behavior, and that third-party coders can identify behavior that reliably relates to the parties' procedural justice antecedent assessments. Study 4 also suggests that appeals to potential “neutral” benchmarks such as legal authority lead to lower assessments of procedural justice. Taken together, Studies 3 and 4 suggest that courtesy and respect are the primary drivers of negotiators' procedural justice assessments, and that such courtesy and respect behavior can be observed by a third-party coder.