Chapter 3: Fairness Heuristic Theory:Assessing the Information to Which People are Reacting has a Pivotal Role in Understanding Organizational Justice

In this chapter, I focus on what I think is one of the most important aspects of fairness heuristic theory: To understand what people judge to be fair we have to carefully assess to what information they are reacting. To illustrate why this is important, a review of four studies is presented. Each one addresses different justice issues. Furthermore, each experiment shows that people look for information that is most relevant to their current situation. Moreover, the studies point out that when the most relevant information is not available, people use other information to assess what is fair and how to react to the situation at hand. In this way, less relevant but available information may be used as a heuristic substitute for more relevant yet missing information. After reviewing these four experiments, a plea is made for the importance of (1) carefully analyzing the information to which people are reacting, and (2) conducting experimental research, which, in my opinion, can substantially further our understanding oforganizational behavior in general and organizational justice processes in particular.