Fair or Not Fair? The Effects of Numerical Framing on the Perceived Justice of Outcomes

Abstract

The authors draw on prospect theory and demonstrate that the perceived justice of an outcome is affected by the way numerical information is presented. Three experimental studies were conducted using five different samples, representing teachers, general employees, and future employees. People generally tend to see a bigger difference in the performance between the self versus another person when their performance components are presented in frames associated with small numbers (e.g., absence rate of 3% vs. 9%) than when they are presented in frames associated with large numbers (e.g., attendance rate of 97% vs. 91%). Despite the same objective performance difference (e.g., 6% in the above example), people expected different fair shares of rewards and evaluated justice of a given outcome differently across the two frames.