Abstract: Perceived justice strongly influenced people’s behaviors, attitudes, and feelings in organizations, friendships and other daily life situations. Specifically, it has been shown that experiencing unfair outcome allocations or unfair procedures leads people to feel much more sad and angry about the events happened to them. Despite the researchers have paid more attention to fairness reactions, there is still relatively little known about what psychological processes exactly drive people’s reactions to justice judgments. In the present article, we explored the role of processing style in people’s reactions to injustice. The study was based on the cognitive-experiential self-theory, one of dual processing theories, which specified two information processing styles, and through which justice/injustice reactions can occur: experiential and rational. Whereas experiential processing occurs relatively subconsciously and effortlessly, rational processing entails deliberate thinking and weighing of the evidence. And experiential processing often involves the use of emotion and other heuristics as information, whereas rational processing involves more evidence-based and logic decisions. Consequently, we speculated that when people got in different situations they maybe have different reactions to injustice depending on whether they view the transgression through an experiential or a rational processing frame. We designed two specific studies to support our hypothesis. Study 1 used a laboratory method, and a 2 (processing style: experiential vs. rational) × 2 (procedure: accuracy vs. inaccuracy) between-group experiment was conducted. Results from a sample of 91 college students showed that both the procedure and processing style had main significant effects on positive emotion, negative emotion and cooperation intention. And the interaction effect between procedure and processing style on positive and negative emotion, cooperation intention was also significant. In other words, processing style moderated both emotional and behavioral reactions to procedural justice. Study 2 used scenario method and a 2 (processing style: experiential vs. rational) × 2 (interpersonal treatment: fair vs. unfair) factorial design. In order to explore how victim justice sensitivity influences the relationship between processing style and the reactions to justice, we also measured participants’ victim justice sensitivity by the Justice Sensitivity Scale. Compared with college students in the previous experiment, 143 employees participated in this study. Results showed that all independent variables and the interaction had non-significant effect on positive emotion, while the main effects of interpersonal justice, processing style, and the interaction effect between them on negative emotion and cooperation intention were significant. That is, processing style also moderated the reactions towards fair treatment in the interpersonal situation, and victim justice sensitivity moderated the relationship between processing style and cooperation intention. But the hypothesis that victim justice sensitivity could moderate the relationship between processing style and emotional reactions to injustice didn’t be verified. To sum up, people who use experiential processing system to deal with injustice information have much stronger negative emotional reaction and less cooperation intention to justice violator than ones who use rational processing system. In addition, for persons with high victim justice sensitivity, processing style has no effect on the reactions to injustice.

Key words: rational vs. experiential processing, justice, justice sensitivity, emotion, cooperation intention

摘要： 基于认知-经验理论，采用行为实验法和情境故事法，探讨了不同信息加工方式对不公正情绪和行为反应的影响，以及受害者敏感性对两者关系的调节作用。结果表明，与理性加工相比，经验加工下个体对不公正有更强烈的负性情绪反应，合作意向更低；受害者敏感性调节加工方式与不公正行为反应之间的关系，即受害者敏感性低时，加工方式与人际公正对合作意向交互作用显著，受害者敏感性高时，加工方式与人际公正对合作意向没有交互作用。

关键词: 理性-经验加工, 公正, 公正敏感性, 情绪, 合作意向