March 2015 The Evolved Functions of Procedural Fairness: An Adaptation for Politics Troels Bøggild Department of Political Science Aarhus University, Denmark E-mail: [email protected] Michael Bang Petersen Department of Political Science Aarhus University, Denmark E-mail: [email protected] Chapter accepted for publication in Todd K. Shackelford & Ranald D. Hansen (Eds.), The Evolution of Morality, New York: Springer. 1 Abstract: Politics is the process of determining resource allocations within and between groups. Group life has constituted a critical and enduring part of human evolutionary history and we should expect the human mind to contain psychological adaptations for dealing with political problems. Previous research has in particular focused on adaptations designed to produce moral evaluations of political outcomes: is the allocation of resources fair? People, however, are not only concerned about outcomes. They also readily produce moral evaluations of the political processes that shape these outcomes. People have a sense of procedural fairness. In this chapter, we identify the adaptive functions of the human psychology of procedural fairness. We argue that intuitions about procedural fairness evolved to deal with adaptive problems related to the delegation of leadership and, specifically, to identify and counter-act exploitative leaders. In the chapter, we first introduce the concept of procedural fairness, review extant social psychological theories and make the case for why an evolutionary approach is needed. Next, we dissect the evolved functions of procedural fairness and review extant research in favor of the evolutionary account. Finally, we discuss how environmental mismatches between ancestral and modern politics make procedural fairness considerations even more potent in modern politics, creating a powerful source of moral outrage. Keywords: procedural fairness, procedural justice, evolutionary psychology, politics, dominance, leadership, strategic moralization 2 Politics is the process of determining resource access (Petersen 2015). In a classical definition, the political scientist, David Easton (1953), thus defined politics as the process of determining the "authoritative allocation of values for a society." In more plain terms, another classical definition described politics as about "who gets what" (Lasswell 1950). These definitions highlight that politics is ultimately about outcomes: who gets a resource and who does not. Some researchers of politics have taken this to imply that outcomes are all people care about in politics. As Ulbig (2002, p. 793) notes, the traditional notion has been that “when people get what they want they do not care how they get it”. Popkin (1991, p. 99), for example, holds that people “care about ends not means; they judge government by results and are . indifferent about the methods by which the results were obtained”. A brief look at the reporting of political news, however, makes it clear that outcomes are just one part of what receives attention in politics. Reports on the substances of political policies (who is affected by the policies and how) are often outnumbered by reports on the political process that leads to the policies (see Patterson 1994; Aalberg et al. 2011): who are the key actors, why do they promote or oppose a specific policy, what are their interests, what is their strategy for achieving those interests? Research has documented that such a focus is, at least in part, demand driven: people crave information about the process leading to outcomes and the strategic aspects involved (Smith et al. 2007; Trussler & Soroka 2014). This appetite for information about what goes on behind the scenes of political outcomes extends even to the personal lives of politicians: who are they, whom are they personally affiliated with, and do they practice what they preach politically? This latter observation illustrates an important point: people's political interest not only extends beyond a narrow interest in the substance of policies; this interest is also moral in nature. Public outrage and strong moral condemnation meets the hypocritical and self-interested politician (Cappella & Jamieson 1996; Hibbing & Alford 2004; Bøggild 2014). 3 The observation that people are morally preoccupied with not just political outcomes but also the processes leading to these outcomes is supported by decades of research in social psychology. This research has predominantly focused on the perceived legitimacy of decisions in the context of everyday life rather than politics. In the contexts of everyday life, it has been demonstrated (1) that people are interested in many more features of decisions than outcomes and (2) that this interest is, in part, moralistic (Charness & Levine 2007; Falk et al. 2008; Ong et al. 2012; van den Bos et al. 1998; Tyler 1990). Many of these studies have been organized around the concept of procedural fairness, which highlights both the orientation towards procedures and the moral nature of this orientation. Empirical findings include that people view decisions as more legitimate if they were allowed to voice their opinions before the decision was made, if the decision maker was impartial and lacked personal interest in the decision, and if all relevant parties were included in the decision- making process (e.g. Tyler 1990). The overall finding that people care not only about the substance and outcomes of decisions but also about how decisions come about when evaluating group leaders and their decisions has been characterized as one of the most replicated findings in social psychology (van den Bos et al. 1998, 1449). Recent empirical studies have extended the concept of procedural fairness to politics, directly confirming the observation that people care about political process as well as political outcomes. It has been shown that whether political institutions follow fair procedures is an important determinant of citizens’ trust in national-level political and legal institutions and political representatives and also that political decisions that emerge from fair procedures receive greater public support (Tyler 1994; Grimes 2006; Ulbig 2008; Bøggild 2014). In this chapter, we ask: Why are people morally preoccupied with features of the processes leading to political outcomes rather than just with the outcomes themselves? Although the concept of procedural fairness has received widespread attention across the 4 social sciences over the past four decades, it remains contested at the theoretical level. As argued by Smith et al. (2007, p. 288), while the empirical support for people’s attention to procedural fairness is steadily growing, “the absence of a theoretical explanation becomes ever more glaring”. More specifically, existing theoretical frameworks have been criticized for being too narrow in their scope and for providing proximate accounts that assume rather than explain why procedural fairness matters (Hibbing & Theiss-Morse 2008). In reference to the distinction between ultimate ("why") and proximate ("how") explanations (Scott-Phillips et al. 2011), we here seek to provide an ultimate explanation of why human moral judgments about decisions are oriented towards the procedural aspects of the decision. To achieve this, we part with previous work on procedural fairness in social psychology in two ways: First, for reasons developed below, we utilize an evolutionary biological framework and dissect the fitness benefits of psychological systems for procedural fairness for humans. Second, we provide an explanation that puts politics front and center. The psychology of procedural fairness, we suggest, evolved specifically to deal with key problems related to politics, such as the formation of hierarchies and the delegation of leadership. Part of the failure of previous theoretical accounts, we suggest, emerges because these accounts have not taken their point of departure in political clashes of interest. Notions of procedural fairness are crucial parts of human nature as a political animal and, to understand the ultimate function of these notions, they need to be analyzed in the context of politics.1 The chapter proceeds in four steps. The first section reviews existing theoretical models of procedural fairness and the main points of criticism that have been launched against them. The second section makes the case for an evolutionary approach to procedural fairness, emphasizing the role of politics in human evolution and fleshes out the adaptive problem that procedural fairness evolved to accommodate: exploitative political leaders. The third section 1 We do not mean to imply that extant (or future) research on procedural fairness conducted in legal, managerial or educational settings is not important. Rather, we view these contexts as also political in the sense that the decision-making processes manage clashes of interests between opposing parties. 5 specifies how notions of procedural fairness serve two distinct purposes in terms of (1) detecting exploitative tendencies in leaders (i.e. a diagnostic function) and (2) actively counteracting and restricting the potential for exploitation in political processes (i.e. a bargaining function). This section also reviews a range of existing empirical evidence in procedural fairness research from social psychology consistent with this account. The fourth section describes how the psychological system for procedural fairness influences modern political attitudes and behaviors—and why mismatches between the