Patrick A. Müller

A Behavioral Disinhibition Hypothesis of Interventions in Moral Dilemmas

The present article puts forward a behavioral disinhibition hypothesis stating that, often, at least some levels of behavioral disinhibition are needed to overcome people’s inhibition to intervene in dilemmatic situations in which they have to choose between different actions with good reasons for each of the actions involved. Results reported indeed show that people to whom disinhibited behaviors were salient or people with stronger predispositions toward behavioral disinhibition were more likely to intervene in trolley and footbridge dilemmas.

Beyond procedure’s content: The role of accessibility experiences and personal uncertainty in procedural justice judgments.

Procedural justice concerns play a critical role in economic settings, politics, and other domains of human life. Despite the vast evidence corroborating their relevance, considerably less is known about how procedural justice judgments are formed. Whereas earlier theorizing focused on the systematic integration of content information, the present contribution provides a new perspective on the formation of justice judgments by examining the influence of accessibility experiences. Specifically, we hypothesize that procedural justice judgments may be formed based on the ease or difficulty with which justice-relevant information comes to mind. Three experiments corroborate this prediction in that procedures were evaluated less positively when the retrieval of associated unfair aspects was easy compared to difficult. Presumably this is because when it feels easy (difficult) to retrieve unfair aspects, these are perceived as frequent (infrequent), and hence the procedure as unjust (just). In addition to demonstrating that ease-of-retrieval may influence justice judgments, the studies further revealed that reliance on accessibility experiences is high in conditions of personal certainty. We suggest that this is because personal uncertainty fosters systematic processing of content information, whereas personal certainty may invite less taxing judgmental strategies such as reliance on ease-of-retrieval.

Mediation in Hierarchical Conflicts: The Role of Gender and Anger

This paper focuses on mediation in conflicts between employer and employee. Based on theories of power, we expect differences in both the perception and effects of the conflict, as well as differences in the evaluation of the mediation between employers and employees in hierarchical conflict; moreover we expect that employees express more of their anger in the mediation. Based on gender role theories we expect that these hierarchical conflicts have stronger negative effects on women, compared with men, and that gender influences the expression of anger, as well as the perception and evaluation of the mediation. Data were collected from 35 respondents who had been involved in mediation. We used both qualitative (coded reports of meetings and agreements), and quantitative data (survey); 30 out of 35 mediations had resulted in exit of the employee. Results show that there are major differences between the employers and employees. Employees define the problem as a relational conflict, report low well being due to the conflict and to the mediation, and express more anger during the mediations. Females report less well being and satisfaction with the mediation. The results are discussed in terms of the information processing model and further implications for mediators.