Chapter 5 focuses on the psychology of the fair process effect. The chapter notes that although the effect is often there, it is important to study it in the context in which it is supposed to appear. After all, the relevance of various criteria and psychological processes may vary across different contexts and the different people present in those contexts. The chapter also notes that it is important to specify which types of dependent variables, such as trust or protest intentions, are most likely to be affected by the fair process effect under consideration. Relevant moderators (such as personal uncertainty) and mediators (such as perceived legitimacy) are discussed as well. The chapter ends with discussing the systemic aspects that are important when understanding the functioning of the fair process effect and how to prevent the effect from being misused in system-justifying ways.

Chapter 3 examines the psychological processes that are important when people are forming perceptions of procedural fairness. The psychology of perceived procedural fairness discussed here argues that quite often people start out with a general hunch that things do not feel right. Cognitive processes help us to understand how to interpret this hunch, allowing people to start forming perceptions of procedural fairness in more confident ways. Groups may facilitate this process, for example, by communicating certain frames about how to interpret what has happened and what group members should do about this. People need to know that they are making progress toward meaningful goals, and this also plays a crucial role in the formation of fairness judgments. How these psychological processes work out in institutional contexts is also important and is discussed as well.

This chapter applies critical consciousness and identity-based motivation theories to understand youth of color’s psychological experiences in the face of oppression and the processes by which they can negotiate and challenge their conditions. Critical consciousness and identity-based motivation theories explicate how inequality shapes psychological processes and how these processes can either perpetuate or serve to challenge inequality. We also draw on the framework of racial capitalism – which posits that contemporary global capitalism emerged out of racial hierarchy – to contextualize the barriers youth of color traverse in their pursuit of social mobility. A racial capitalism analysis highlights the injustices youth of color contend with. We first provide overviews of the context of racial capitalism, identity-based motivation, and critical consciousness independently, and then we highlight the overlap between identity-based motivation and critical consciousness within the context of US racial capitalism. This synthesis helps to clarify how youth experience and navigate injustice by leveraging insights from both identity-based motivation and critical consciousness to illuminate the mechanisms that either thwart or promote their healthy development.

On one interpretation, Jaspers’ discussion of imaginative understanding explains how we know causal relations between psychological states. Cognitive neuroscience models of delusions typically aim at characterizing the organic disturbance that underlies the ‘primary delusion’; then, it’s assumed, mentalistic causation takes over and generates the other symptoms. No account is given of the biological underpinning of psychological causation. Imaginative understanding is not well-described by ‘simulation’ models. Simulation theory is predictive and does not attempt to find causation. Imagination here is best understood as correlative with the idea of a psychological process; imaginative understanding of psychological processes drives our ordinary conception of mental causation. We know roughly what a psychological process is and what a biological process is.But there seems to be no presumption we can map one onto the other. I review the options here and something of their implications for how we think about mind and brain in psychiatry.