Abstract
According to a recent study (e.g., Ambrose & Schminke, 2001), politeness and accountability may be the major interpersonal factors in procedural justice. In this study, two experiments were conducted by using honorific language as a politeness factor and the amount of information that was the reason for the decision-maker’s judgment as an accountability factor. The effect of politeness was not rejected, but the effect of accountability was not observed in Experiment 1. A task that strengthens the participant’s attention to the explanation was added in Experiment 2; only the effect of the accountability factor was confirmed. As a result, it is suggested that the participants whose cognitive peripheral routes were activated perceived procedural fairness through politeness, and the participants whose cognitive central routes were activated perceived procedural fairness via accountability. In actual trials, the cognitive central route was activated when the disputant recognized personal interest, played a social role, or wanted to reveal convincing facts. Therefore, he or she probes ideal and logical objects such as the reasons for the judgments more than a judge’s polite behavior.
