Social Psychology Quarterly

Procedural justice theory increasingly guides policing reforms in the United States and abroad. Yet the primary sources of perceived police procedural justice are still unclear. Building on social schema research, we posit civilians’ perceptions of police procedural justice only partly reflect their personal and vicarious experiences with officers. We theorize perceptions of the police are anchored in a broader “relational justice schema,” composed of views about how respectful, fair, and unbiased most people are in their dealings with others. Individuals’ experiences with certain nonlegal actors and neighborhood environments should directly affect their relational justice schema and indirectly affect their evaluation of police. Nevertheless, experiences with police, especially mistreatment by officers, should also affect perceived police procedural justice and may moderate the effects of relational justice schema endorsement. We test our hypotheses in two studies with national samples. The findings strongly support a social schematic model of perceived police procedural justice.

The authors build on previous stress theories by drawing attention to the concept of anticipatory couple-level minority stressors (i.e., stressors expected to occur in the future that emanate from the stigmatization of certain relationship forms). A focus on anticipatory couple-level minority stressors brings with it the potential for important insight into vulnerabilities and resiliencies of people in same-sex relationships, the focus of this study. The authors use relationship timelines to examine stressors among a diverse sample of same-sex couples (n = 120). Respondents in same-sex relationships anticipated stressors that are likely not unique to same-sex couples (e.g., purchasing a home together) but labeled many of these anticipatory stressors as reflecting the stigmatization of their same-sex relationship. Respondents rated anticipatory minority stressors as more stressful than other anticipatory stressors. Moreover, stressors varied by gender, age, and relationship duration although not race/ethnicity or geographic site. This analysis is a preliminary step in examining how unique anticipatory couple-level minority stressors function as determinants of relationship quality, mental and physical health, and health disparities faced by sexual minority populations. Attempts to understand current stress levels should consider anticipatory stressors alongside past and current life events, chronic strains, daily hassles, and minority stressors, as these processes are impossible to disentangle and may be consequential for current well-being.

Affect control theory shows how cultural meanings for identities and behavior are used to form impressions of events and guide social action. In this research, I examine whether members of the same culture tend to process social events in the same way, with a focus on U.S. English speakers. I find widespread consensus in the mechanisms of impression formation, particularly for judgments of evaluation (goodness, esteem), but also find sufficient individual differences to warrant further study for models of potency (power, dominance) and object impressions (feelings about the target of a behavior). Findings support long-standing claims that members of U.S. English language culture, especially cultural experts, tend to process social events in the same way. However, I find no significant gender differences in event processing. I close the paper by estimating and interpreting new impression change equations using methodological techniques appropriate to the degree of consensus found for each model.

Drawing on the theory of the “Big Two” content dimensions of social judgment—agency and communion—the author proposes that several findings about partisan differences in the United States can be integrated into one hypothesis: Republicans tend to put greater value on agency, while Democrats put greater value on communion. Moreover, on the basis of these values, Republicans and Democrats should judge their own groups as particularly superior on agency and communion, respectively. These hypotheses gained support in three studies on partisan values and ingroup bias, suggesting that the agency-communion framework may be useful for researchers studying how political groups differ in their worldviews, biases, and attitudes.