Pro-Social with guest Matt Katsaros, A Recap

For our second Pro-Social on October 17, Matt Katsaros joined us for a conversation about procedural justice. We talked about the principles of procedural justice and how they can - and should - be applied to platform governance.

Procedural justice is the application of fairness to the process of addressing rules violations. An essential part of procedural justice is understanding the psychology of perceived fairness or, as Katsaros directly put it, the fact that "people care about how they are treated." Katsaros walked us through pillars of the theory and also gave us some insights into why they've taken so long to catch on, and still have far to go. 

One reason Prosocial Design Network gets jazzed about applying procedural justice to platform design is that it achieves three goals at once: it lets platforms treat each of its users with respect and dignity, protect all of its users, and improve prosocial outcomes by decreasing recidivism. You can see some of those positive results in our library items on reminding users of norms and explaining why comments were removed.  A couple of days after our conversation with Katsoros, we were also excited to read that Discord put procedural principles into action likewise with success stories to tell.

You can read more about procedural justice theory at Yale’s Justice Collaboratory - and also catch the full interview with Matt below.