Rosen and Mericle (1979) claimed to have demonstrated that the simple strength of an organization's affirmative-action policy statement can cause decision makers to engage in behaviors that subvert the goals of the policy. We questioned the conceptual and empirical validity of their claim, pointing out the absence of any attention to issues of decision makers' understanding and evaluations of the procedures of affirmative action. Based on a procedural-justice approach, we replicated and extended the Rosen and Mericle study by including measures of respondents' preexisting conceptions and evaluations of the procedural features of affirmative action. That replication showed that decision makers' understanding and evaluations of procedures, as represented by a set of procedural-justice variables, provide a more complete description of the influence of affirmative action on the behavior of decision makers.
