Perceived Fairness of an Ethnic Validation Procedure

Revision with unchanged content. Procedures are used today in all areas of life including business, education, politics and as in this study to determine a group's ethnicity. American Indians are the only ethnic group that must petition to the United States government to validate legally their ethnicity. The current study explores the effects of social exclusion threat negative affect on the evaluated fairness of a procedure that functions to validate ethnic membership using the Dimensional Voice Model (Bane, 1994). Participants consisted of 120 (60 = female, 60 = male) college students. The study design was a 2 (Gender) X 2 (Justification) X 3 (Procedure) factorial between-groups experimental design. Based on social exclusion theory, individuals may experience high levels of negative affect when they perceive a threat of exclusion from a group. It was hypothesized that a procedure designed to validate ethnic membership will result in social exclusion threat negative affect. A procedure designed to validate ethnic membership was hypothesized as being evaluated as unfair. Of two procedural justifications, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Science Foundation (NSF) justification was hypothesized as being perceived fairer.