Jaap Ham, Kees van den Bos, and Evert A. Van Doorn Utrecht University

Transcription

1 HAM ET AL. LADY JUSTICE THINKS UNCONSCIOUSLY Social Cognition, Vol. 27, No. 4, 2009, pp Lady Justice Thinks Unconsciously: Unconscious Thought can Lead to More Accurate Justice Judgments Jaap Ham, Kees van den Bos, and Evert A. Van Doorn Utrecht University In this article, we argue that when forming justice judgments, unconscious thought can lead to more accurate justice judgments than both conscious thought and immediate judgment. In two experiments, participants formed justice judgments about complex job application procedures. Specifically, participants made comparative justice judgments (Experiment 1) or absolute justice judgments on rating scales (Experiment 2). In immediate judgment conditions, participants made a justice judgment immediately after reading the stimulus materials. In conscious thought conditions, participants consciously thought about their justice judgment for 3 minutes. In unconscious thought conditions, participants were distracted for 3 minutes and then reported their justice judgments. As predicted, findings of both experiments show that unconscious thinkers made the most accurate justice judgments. These results provide a new perspective on the social psychology of justice judgments and yield additional insight into unconscious thinking. Ever since the days of Aristotle and Plato, there have been arguments in moral philosophy and philosophical ethics that either rationalist or intuitionist conceptions of justice are true (Beauchamp, 2001). Rationalistic and intuitionist models describe the way people form justice judgments differently. For example, imagine reading a detailed description of four different application procedures that four job applicants experienced. How will you make the most accurate judgments about the justice levels of each of these application procedures? Rationalistic approaches Jaap Ham, Kees van den Bos, and Evert A. van Doorn, Department of Social and Organizational Psychology, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands. Jaap Ham is now at the Department of Human-Technology Interaction, Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands. The research reported in this article was supported by a VICI innovational research grant from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO, ) awarded to Kees van den Bos. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Jaap Ham, Department of Human- Technology Interaction, Eindhoven University of Technology, IPO 1.36, P.O. Box 513, 5600 MB, Eindhoven, The Netherlands. j.r.c.ham@tue.nl. 509

2 510 ham ET AL. to the justice judgment process dictate that people make their justice judgments by thinking hard about the just and unjust components of each application procedure and make deliberate and conscious justice judgments (e.g., Kant, 1785). In contrast, intuitionist models of justice judgments state that people make justice judgments by following their gut reactions and can give their justice judgments immediately (e.g., Hume, 1739). Extending on these models, the current article argues for the merits of a new way of thinking about how people best should construct justice judgments: We argue that giving your justice judgments after a few minutes of distraction and thereby not consciously but unconsciously processing the problem at hand may lead to the most accurate justice judgments about these application procedures. 1 Social Justice Judgments From various scientific disciplines (ranging from economics to ethology; see e.g., Beauchamp, 2001; Cohen, 1986; De Waal, 1996; Kahneman, Knetsch, & Thaler, 1986; see also Mikula & Wenzel, 2000), we know that people frequently assess the justice level of situations experienced in their lives. Furthermore, social justice represents a core issue in society, politics, organizations, intimate relationships indeed in almost every social situation in which people interact with each other (Folger, 1984). Therefore, forming justice judgments may be assumed to be crucial human activities. In modern moral psychology (e.g., Haidt, 2007), the two different perspectives on the way that people form justice judgments are characterized as moral reasoning and moral intuition, respectively. Thus, some researchers view justice judgments to be formed primarily by means of deliberate processes of conscious thought. For example, Jasso (1994, 1999) and Sabbagh, Dar, and Resh (1994) suggest that people perform mental calculations (e.g., logarithm-based functions that include 16 variables or more) to assess what is just (e.g., Jasso, 1994, 1999; Sabbagh et al., 1994). In contrast, other researchers argue that the way people make moral and justice judgments is primarily through fast and unconscious social-cognitive processes (e.g., Haidt, 2001; Kagan, 1984; Wilson, 1993). For instance, Haidt (2001) argues that moral judgment is generally the result of quick, automatic evaluations (intuitions) (p. 814). In the current article, we propose a relatively new perspective on the way that justice judgments fruitfully may be formed. That is, we argue that taking time to unconsciously think about whether just or unjust events have happened may lead to the most accurate justice judgments. We build our line of reasoning on the basis of recent developments in the social-cognitive literature on unconscious thinking. 1. Different from earlier accounts on unconsciously made justice judgments, our approach is normative in nature. That is, following unconscious thought theory (Dijksterhuis & Nordgren, 2006) and the paradigms developed within that framework (see, e.g., Dijksterhuis, 2004; Dijksterhuis et al., 2006), we are focusing explicitly on how unconscious thought can lead to the most accurate justice judgments. We want to emphasize that we are not contrasting our findings to earlier descriptive models that tend to focus on describing the processes with which people typically form justice judgments (see, e.g., Haidt, 2001).

3 LADY JUSTICE THINKS UNCONSCIOUSLY 511 Unconscious Thinking About Justice Judgments Among other things, social cognition research has found that people can make various types of social judgments in unconscious ways (e.g., Hassin, Aarts, & Ferguson, 2005). In social cognition research, spontaneous social inferences are typically made about relatively simple situation descriptions (see Uleman, 1999). In contrast, many day-to-day justice judgments are relatively complex and contain many variables. That is, we know that quite often assessing what is just in a certain situation demands cognitive processing of many factors at the same time (Folger & Cropanzano, 1998). Therefore, one could assume that in many cases the justice judgment process constitutes a complex psychological process. Interestingly, recent research findings suggest that for complex judgments, unconscious social-cognitive processes have merits (Dijksterhuis, 2004; Dijksterhuis, Bos, Nordgren, & Van Baaren, 2006). Conscious thought refers to the cognitive and/ or affective task-relevant processes one is consciously aware of while attending to a task (Dijksterhuis, 2004, p. 586). For example, one can compare two apartments one could buy, and consciously compare the different aspects of both apartments and then make a decision. Unconscious thought on the other hand refers to cognitive and/or affective task-relevant processes that take place outside conscious awareness (Dijksterhuis, 2004, p. 586). The saying To sleep on it characterizes this kind of processing and its merits (although, of course, unconscious thinking does not refer to sleeping). When deciding on one of two apartments for example, one can compare the two, distract the mind from the problem for some time, and only then the thought I ll choose apartment A pops into mind. This thought itself is conscious, but the transition from indecision to a preference some time later is the result of unconscious thought. When solving complex problems, Dijksterhuis and colleagues (Dijksterhuis, 2004; Dijksterhuis et al., 2006) argue that unconscious thinking leads to more accurate judgments whereas conscious thinking leads to less accurate judgments. They argue so mainly because of the limits of conscious human processing capacity (Miller, 1956) whereas human unconsciousness is very well able to integrate large amounts of information (Betsch, Plessner, Schwieren, & Gütig, 2001). Another relevant factor in this respect is that unconscious thinkers can continue to think about pressing matters in the absence of conscious attention. Recent research findings provide support for the merits of unconscious thought for solving complex problems. Dijksterhuis (2004, Study 2) asked participants to choose one of four apartments, each apartment being described by many attributes. One apartment was described by a majority of positive attributes, another by a majority of negative attributes, and the two other apartments were described by an even number of positive and negative attributes. In this way, the accuracy of a decision could be judged from a normative perspective as one apartment was objectively better than the other three apartments. Next, some participants immediately had to make a decision about which apartment they would choose (immediate decision condition). Other participants (conscious thought condition) could think about the decision for three minutes and then had to indicate their decision. The remaining third of the participants (unconscious thought condition) performed a distractor task for three minutes which prevented conscious thought about the apartment decision they had to make but which enabled them to think

4 512 ham ET AL. unconsciously about the apartment decision, and indicated their decision after the distraction period. As expected, compared to participants in the immediate decision and conscious thought conditions, participants in the unconscious thinking condition more frequently chose the most attractive apartment. So, support for predictions has been obtained for predictions of unconscious thought theory, but thus far only on decisions related to product choice (e.g., apartment choice, car choice; see Dijksterhuis & Nordgren, 2006) and not on important judgments such as decisions pertaining to justice judgments. The present article intends to fill this void. More specifically, we argue in the present article that because many important justice judgments may involve complex decision problems (Folger & Cropanzano, 1998), people will profit from and hence make very accurate justice judgments through unconscious thinking. That is, when making justice judgments people often need to base their justice judgments on a lot of information, gathered from many different sources. For example, for making a justice judgment about the justice-levels of job application procedures at a certain company, a person needs to gather many different pieces of information from various sources, and needs not only process that information on its own, but also the corresponding source-characteristics. Making a justice judgment about such a situation indeed constitutes a complex decision problem (see also Folger & Cropanzano, 1998). So, in line with unconscious thought theory (Dijksterhuis & Nordgren, 2006), we argue that it should be the case that participants in unconscious thinking conditions will report the most accurate justice judgments, compared to conscious thought and immediate decision conditions. We think that finding evidence for the profits of unconscious thinking for making justice judgments would be very important for several reasons. That is, if we would obtain evidence for this prediction, the current research would provide evidence for a new perspective on the way people make justice judgments. To our knowledge, this new perspective has not been applied to the justice literature before, so the union of the two lines of work (research of social justice and research of unconscious thinking) may be a strength of the current article and may give new insights into the social-cognitive processes by which justice judgments are formed. Furthermore, investigating this issue can further extend research and theorizing on the new and exciting field of unconscious thinking research. For instance, it has been suggested in the justice literature (Van den Bos, Ham, Lind, Simonis, Van Essen, & Rijpkema, 2008) that the cognitive processes of making justice judgments are unique or different from the cognitive decision processes studied in social cognition research and unconscious thinking research (Dijksterhuis, 2004; Dijksterhuis et al., 2006). If merits of unconscious thinking prove to exist for justice judgments, this would reveal important information about the generalizability of the unconscious thinking hypothesis. Also, the complex justice judgments of the current research might prove to be valuable stimuli that may be conducive to use in future unconscious thought research. We will come back to these issues in the General Discussion. The Current Research In two studies, we will investigate the possible merits of unconscious thinking for people s justice judgments. In both experiments, participants were presented with

5 LADY JUSTICE THINKS UNCONSCIOUSLY 513 complex and extensive information about four application procedures that job applicants had experienced. One of these descriptions of an application procedure implied a predominantly fair application procedure, and one implied a mostly unfair application procedure. The two remaining descriptions implied neither very fair nor very unfair application procedures. After this information had been presented, some participants (the conscious thought condition) could think about their justice judgments for three minutes and then were asked to indicate their justice judgments. Other participants (the unconscious thought condition) performed a distractor task for three minutes which prevented conscious thought about the justice judgments they had to make, after which they were asked to indicate their justice judgments. The remainder of the participants were asked to make a justice judgment immediately (immediate judgment condition). In Experiment 1, participants made their justice judgments in a manner comparable to that of participants in earlier research of unconscious thought (Dijksterhuis, 2004, Study 2). That is, participants were asked to directly compare the justice levels of the four application procedures and to indicate which procedure was the most just. In Experiment 2, participants made their justice judgments comparable to the assessment of justice judgments in earlier justice research (see, e.g., the appendix in Lind & Tyler, 1988; see also Colquitt & Shaw, 2005): They indicated their justice judgments on rating scales for each application procedure separately. The dependent variable we constructed in all experiments was the accuracy of participants justice judgments. That is, building on Dijksterhuis (2004), we constructed accuracy scores that indicated whether participants correctly indicated the appropriate application procedure to be the most fair application procedure, the appropriate application procedure to be the most unjust procedure, and the appropriate two other ones as of intermediate justice levels. Experiment 1 Method Participants and Design. Fifty-five students (11 men and 44 women) at Utrecht University were randomly assigned to one of three experimental conditions: an immediate judgment condition, a conscious thought condition, and an unconscious thought condition. All participants were native Dutch speakers. The experiments lasted 30 minutes, for which participants were paid 3 Euros (approximately $3.75 U.S. at the time the studies in this article were conducted). Materials and Procedure. Each application procedure was described by a list of 14 items, yielding a total of 56 different items. There were three categories of items: just items, unjust items, and filler items. Ten items were used to describe just elements of the application procedure (e.g., The application procedure was clearly explained ). Ten items were used to describe unjust elements of the application procedure (e.g., Of four administered tests, only one was examined during applicant selection ). Another 8 items were justice-neutral items that were (slightly) related to social justice but did not necessarily imply a just event or an unjust event (e.g., The applicant had to wait upon arriving ). The remaining 28 items served

6 514 ham ET AL. as filler items and were not directly related to social justice (e.g., The company website was reasonably well taken care of ). 2 These justice-neutral items and filler items were included in order to increase the complexity of the decision problem. All items were presented to participants in Dutch. One of the four different application procedures was designed to convey a predominantly just application procedure to the participants: This application procedure was presented by means of 5 just items and 1 unjust item. Another procedure was constructed so that it predominantly conveyed an unjust application procedure: Participants read 5 unjust items and 1 just item. In addition, both the just and the unjust application procedure each also contained 2 justice-neutral items and 6 filler items. The justice-neutral application procedure contained 4 justice-neutral items and 10 filler items. The justice-ambiguous application procedure contained 4 just items, 4 unjust items, and 6 filler items. For each participant, we randomly selected items from the available item categories for all four application procedures, but such that each participant saw each item only once. Within each list, items were arranged in a random order. Four photographs of young men and four male Dutch first names ( Chiel, Freek, Joris, and Niels ) were used to identify the four job applicants. For each participant, the application procedures and the photographs and first names were randomly combined. Participants were seated in individual cubicles in front of a computer and the experiment was described as an experiment on decision making. Participants were told that they would be presented with the description of a complex situation consisting of information about four hypothetical application procedures which four job applicants experienced. Participants were asked to form an impression of the four application procedures, and were told that they would be asked to judge the justness of the application procedure each job applicant experienced. Furthermore, participants were told how on each of the following screens, the application procedure a job applicant experienced would be presented. Next, the four lists of informational items and person-identifying information were presented. On each screen, a set was displayed such that the list of 14 items was presented on the right hand side of the screen, while the photograph and a first name identifying the job applicant was presented on the left hand side of the screen. Each list with accompanying identifying information was presented for 26 seconds, 3 after which, in random order, the next list was presented. After presentation of all information, participants in the immediate judgment condition were asked to give their justice judgments immediately. Participants in the conscious thought condition were asked to think about their justice judg- 2. In a pretest, 28 students were asked to evaluate how just they thought the informational items we used in Experiments 1 and 2 would be within the setting of an application procedure (1 = very unjust, 7 = very just). Results indicated that just items were indeed judged to be more just (M = 5.5, SD = 0.5) than unjust items (M = 3.1, SD = 0.3), F(1, 27) = 303.4, p <.001. Also, justice-neutral items were judged to be less just (M = 4.3, SD = 0.2) than just items, F(1, 27) = 372.6, p <.001, and more just than unjust items, F(1, 27) = 165.4, p <.001. Likewise, filler items were judged to be less just (M = 4.4, SD = 0.2) than just items, F(1, 27) = 191.7, p <.001, and to be more just than unjust items, F(1, 27) = 293.4, p < A duration of only 26 seconds for presenting each list with accompanying identifying information was chosen to increase the difficulty of the task.

7 LADY JUSTICE THINKS UNCONSCIOUSLY 515 ment for each application procedure. More specifically, think about how just or unjust you found the application procedure each job applicant experienced. For this, they were given 3 minutes. Participants in the unconscious thought condition were told that they would be asked for their justice judgments, but that first they were to do another task. This task was the distractor task aimed at preventing conscious thought. For this purpose, we used the 2-back task (Jonides et al., 1997), which has been used successfully in earlier research by Dijksterhuis (2004). This demanding task affects executive functioning quite severely and can therefore be expected to successfully eliminate conscious thought. In this task, participants are shown a new number (1 through 9) each second and they are asked to respond each time the newest number presented matches the number preceding it by two places. The 2-back task lasted for 3 minutes (including an instruction screen that lasted 20 seconds). Next, participants were asked for their justice judgments through a comparison task which required participants to rearrange the photographs of the applicants in such a way, that the photograph of the applicant who they felt had received the most just treatment was to be placed on the left, followed by the second and third most justly treated applicant. The applicant who they felt had received the most unjust treatment was to be placed on the right. Our main dependent measure, the justice judgment accuracy score, was calculated by giving one point for each correctly placed photograph. The correct order of locations for the four photographs was based on the normative comparison between the job application procedure descriptions. That is, the correct location of the four pictures followed from our construction of the contends of each job application procedure: the photograph of the job applicant who experienced the just application procedure (which was presented, as described, by means of 5 just items and 1 unjust items) should have been placed on the left; the photograph of the job applicant who experienced the unjust application procedure (which was presented, as described, by means of 1 just item and 5 unjust item) should have been placed on the right; and the other two job applicants (who experienced the justice-neutral application procedure respectively the justice-ambiguous application procedure) should have been placed in either one of the middle two slots. In this way, participants received a justice judgment accuracy score of either 1, 2, or 4, representing 1, 2, or 4 correctly placed photographs. Finally, participants filled out a number of demographical questions, were debriefed and thanked for their participation. Results and Discussion An analysis of variance (ANOVA) on the justice judgments accuracy scores showed a main effect of our thought manipulation, F(2, 52) = 4.36, p <.05. As predicted, participants in the unconscious-thought condition had higher justice judgment accuracy scores (M = 2.0, SD = 1.2) and thus made more accurate justice comparisons than participants in both the conscious-thought condition (M = 0.9, SD = 0.8), F(1, 52) = 7.98, p <.01, and the immediate-judgments condition (M = 1.2, SD = 1.2), F(1, 52) = 5.11, p <.05. Justice judgment accuracy scores in the conscious thought condition did not differ from justice judgment accuracy scores in the immediate judgment condition, F < 1.

8 516 ham ET AL. In line with expectations, our findings indicate that participants in the unconscious thought condition were able to make justice judgments based on the complex justice-relevant situation more accurately than participants who were asked to consciously think about their judgments or who were asked to give their immediate judgment. Before we draw further conclusions on the basis of these findings, we think it is important to replicate these findings. Also, the current measure of justice judgments was a comparison measure, in which different application procedures were compared to each other. Although this measure was similar to measures used in earlier unconscious thought research (Dijksterhuis, 2004), it is different from the rating scales used by earlier justice research to assess justice judgments (see, e.g., Colquitt & Shaw, 2005; Lind & Tyler, 1988). Therefore, Experiment 2 will address the question whether superiority of unconscious thought can be found on justice judgment measures that are more commonly used in justice research. Experiment 2 Method Participants and Design. Fifty-one students (17 men and 34 women) at Utrecht University were randomly assigned to one of three experimental conditions: an immediate judgment condition, a conscious thought condition, and an unconscious processing condition. All participants were native Dutch speakers and received 3 Euros for their participation. Materials and Procedure. Materials used in the current study were identical to those used in Experiment 1. The procedure was also the same, except for the measurement of justice judgment. That is, four lists of informational items and personidentifying information were presented in random order, and after presentation of all information participants were given the instructions related to the three thought conditions. Next however, participants in Experiment 2 were asked for their justice judgments as follows. The photograph and first name of a job applicant were again presented on screen, together with several justice judgment questions. Specifically, participants were asked to evaluate how just (1 = very just, 7 = very unjust), fair (1 = very unfair, 7 = very fair), appropriate (1 = very inappropriate, 7 = very appropriate), and justified (1 = very unjustified, 7 = very justified) they thought the application procedure of the applicant represented by the photograph and first name to be (for that job applicant). Then, at random, the photograph and first name of another job applicant were presented on screen, and the same questions were asked for that application procedure until all four application procedures had been assessed. Participant s answers to these four items were averaged to form a reliable scale of their justice judgments for each application procedure (αs >.92, for all of the four application procedures). A justice judgment accuracy score indicating the correctness of each participant s justice judgment on this task was calculated such that a higher score indicated a stronger overlap between the pattern of answers of a participant and the pattern of objective justice levels of each application procedure. Specifically, for each of the following, 1 point was added to the justice judgment accuracy score

9 LADY JUSTICE THINKS UNCONSCIOUSLY 517 of a participant: If a participant (correctly) rated (a) the just application procedure more just than they rated the unjust application procedure; (b) the just application procedure more just than they rated the justice-neutral application procedure; (c) the just application procedure more just than they rated the justice-ambiguous application procedure; and if participants rated (d) the unjust application procedure less just than they rated the justice-neutral application procedure; (e) the unjust application procedure less just than they rated the justice-ambiguous application procedure. In this way, a maximum of 5 points could be assigned to a participant s justice judgment accuracy score, and therefore, a justice judgment accuracy score of 0 indicated low correctness of a participant s justice judgment, whereas a score of 5 indicated high correctness of a participant s justice judgment. The variable constructed in this way constituted the main dependent variable of Experiment 2. Results As predicted, and replicating Experiment 1, the justice judgment accuracy scores showed a main effect of our thought manipulation, F(2, 48) = 4.75, p <.05. Participants in the unconscious thought condition had higher justice judgment accuracy scores (M = 3.9, SD = 1.0) than participants in the conscious thought (M = 2.8, SD = 1.4), F(1, 48) = 5.35, p <.05, and immediate judgment conditions (M = 3.1, SD = 1.4), F(1, 48) = 8.68, p <.01. In further correspondence with Experiment 1, justice judgment accuracy scores in the conscious thought condition were not significantly different from those in the immediate judgment condition, F < 1. General Discussion In two studies, we found evidence for our proposition that people who make justice judgments about complex situation descriptions can profit from unconscious thinking. Specifically, Experiment 1 indicates that participants who were distracted for a few minutes which allowed them to think unconsciously made the most accurate justice judgments as compared to participants who were asked to consciously think about their judgments for several minutes or who were asked to give their immediate judgment. Experiment 2 replicated these findings on a different measure of people s justice judgments. That is, participants in Experiment 1 made comparative justice judgments, similar to earlier unconscious thinking research (e.g., Dijksterhuis, 2004), whereas participants in Experiment 2 made absolute justice judgments assessed by rating scales comparable to most earlier justice research (e.g., Colquitt & Shaw, 2005; Lind & Tyler, 1988). Taken together, these results provide evidence for the merits of unconscious thought for justice judgments as these findings are the first to reveal that the accuracy of justice judgments increases under conditions that allow for unconscious thought relative to conditions of conscious thought or immediate judgment. Importantly, the current findings indicate that unconscious thought can lead to more accurate justice judgments than both conscious thought and immediate judgment can. Thereby, the current findings suggest that in the many areas of human functioning in which justice judgments play an important role, unconscious thinking has merits over other ways of processing and that these merits are im-

10 518 ham ET AL. portant to investigate. An important example would be the area of law, where judges have to make important decisions based in a major part on justice judgments. Intriguingly, a recent study we performed indeed finds support for the merits of unconscious thinking for making judgments about who was guilty in a legal case (Ham & Van den Bos, 2008c). Finding evidence for these implications would also be especially relevant for decision making in contexts in which justice judgments are highly socially relevant and consequential, such as contexts of social conflict and negotiation or arbitration. Not only could future research study the consequences on unconscious thinking in these contexts, it could also analyze the way decisions are made in the day-to-day reality of those contexts, and the role of unconscious thinking in it. For example, current practices in social conflict negotiations might already include mechanisms to stimulate unconscious thinking, like for example including distractions in negotiation programs. Finding evidence for the merits of unconscious thinking would highlight the importance of the current research: The present article provides a starting point in showing the merits of unconscious thinking for making justice judgments, and provides methods for future experimental investigations of the role of unconscious thinking in research of social justice. Furthermore, the current findings are in support of a new perspective on the way that justice judgments may be fruitfully formed. That is, next to the perspectives that characterize the way people form justice judgments as moral reasoning, and moral intuition, the current findings may suggest the following: Taking time to unconsciously think about whether just or unjust events have happened can lead to the most accurate justice judgments. So, it may be not so much conscious deliberation (cf. the moral reasoning approach) or fast unconscious processes (cf. the moral intuition approach), but taking some time to unconsciously process information about complex justice issues that may yield the most accurate justice judgments. Future research may more fully explore the implications of this possibly new perspective on the social psychology of justice judgments. The implications of our findings for moral reasoning and intuition approaches may also highlight something important of the unconscious thinking literature, namely the possibility that unconscious thought processes may come in two forms. That is, on the one hand, there is fast unconscious thought that is suited best for judging relatively simple problems. Research of automatic social judgments studied these processes, and showed, for example, that people can draw quick and spontaneous inferences about simple social-justice relevant situations (Ham & Van den Bos, 2008a, 2008b ). On the other hand, there is slow unconscious thought that is suited best for judging complex situations (Dijksterhuis et al., 2006), an example being the current research. This new insight does not simply equate unconscious processing with fast processing and conscious processing with slow processing, as was implicit in the distinction between moral intuition and moral reasoning, but, rather, differentiates between fast unconscious processes and slow unconscious processes, and, furthermore, proposes the testable prediction that fast and slow unconscious processes may be suited best for simple and complex judgments, respectively. In line with this distinction, we wish to suggest here that a specific type of socialcognitive processing might be best suited to assess and solve a specific type of problem or situation. Thereby, each of the three perspectives on how people make moral and justice judgments (moral reasoning, moral intuition, and unconscious

11 LADY JUSTICE THINKS UNCONSCIOUSLY 519 morality) might have its own area of validity, which future research could investigate. However, as argued earlier, the current new perspective on making justice judgments may be best fitting to the way people make many justice judgments in day-to-day life, because day-to-day justice-relevant situations tend to be relatively complex. Future research could also investigate boundaries to the merits of unconscious thinking for justice judgments. For example, there might also be situations that are either too complex or otherwise run into boundaries of unconscious thinking to profit from it. For example, often there may be too little time available to slowly and unconsciously process what happened in a complex situation, and then fast processes perhaps work best. In the debate between theorists adhering to a moral reasoning perspective and those adopting a moral intuition standpoint regarding how people form moral and justice judgments, there has not been a lot of attention to the issue of what type of processing leads to the most accurate justice judgments. For example, Haidt s (2001) model is a theory about how people make their judgments, and does not focus on whether or not those judgments are accurate. In fact, Haidt (2001) explicitly argues that his model is descriptive (i.e., a model of how judgments are made) rather than normative or prescriptive (i.e., about how judgments should be made). Our findings, however, do focus on the accuracy of justice judgments and, in doing so, reveal that justice judgments based on unconscious thought can be more accurate than judgments based on conscious reasoning and judgments based on immediate decision processes. Thereby, the unconscious thinking perspective supported by the current findings allows for a new type of theory about how people make justice judgments. That is, this new perspective allows to go from descriptive models of how people make moral or justice judgments to models that describe or predict when people s justice judgments will be most accurate. The current findings expand our knowledge on the social psychology of unconscious thinking, a new and largely unexplored research area (Dijksterhuis et al., 2006). The current findings can be seen as an important replication of unconscious thinking effects: We now know that also judgments about justice profit from unconscious thinking judgments that are ubiquitous in real life and important to people (Folger, 1984). This is also important because in the justice literature suggestions can be found that there is something unique about the justice concept that causes the process of how justice judgments are formed to be different from other decision processes, a suggestion that seems to be countered by our findings and other research results (Van den Bos et al., 2008). Finally, the justice materials presented here may provide valuable stimuli that may further research of unconscious thinking. That is, research on unconscious thinking can now use these new materials because they suggest offering reliable effects of manipulations of this type of thinking. Justice judgments might be a very relevant area of research for research of unconscious thought, because these kinds of judgments are complex, common in daily life, and very important to all kinds of people. Conclusions So, what is the best way to make accurate justice judgments about a certain situation? The current research suggests that Lady Justice will not form the most ac-

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