jost_j_t_kay_a_c_thorisdottir_n_social_and_psychological_bas

has drawn correct lessons from history—at least according to one influential school of economic history (North, 1981, 2005)? If one believes that ego resilience, intelligence, the capacity to delay gratification, and a strong work ethic are found more often among the economically successful, does that count as evidence that one has been gulled into accepting system-justifying Horatio Alger stories (cf. Wakslak, Jost, Tyler, & Chen, 2007), as evidence that one is in touch with sociological reality (as Herrnstein & Murray, 1994, suggest), or as evidence that one has embraced an adaptive illusion (Taylor & Brown, 1988)?

These questions are unanswerable in real-world debates because it is so easy for advocates—motivated reasoners that we all are to some degree (Kunda, 1999)—to invent facts and double standards that conceal potential trade-offs (an invention process that, if it is to serve its subterraneanmotivational function, should occur out of awareness and be invisible to others). But these questions become answerable in the hypothetical-society paradigm because it is so difficult for advocates to conceal the same trade-offs in a world in which all of the key factual parameters have been specified by experimental fiat. The hypothetical-society paradigm then becomes the platform for previously impossible conversations between theorists. For instance, even if we are right and if transparent-motivational theories can outmaneuver subterranean-motivational theories in carefully choreographed hypothetical societies that compel conscious acknowledgment of complex value trade-offs, subterranean-motivational theorists still have a number of reasonable counterarguments. They can posit that socially undesirable motivational forces only come into play when enough attributional ambiguity exists to permit rationalization covers—or that such motives only come into play in settings that better simulate real-world status relationships. We do not dismiss such arguments as patch-up operations of a degenerating research program. Such defenses may well be defensible, and the best way to tell is by gradually adding the requisite complexity and realism to hypothetical-society studies.

In brief, if we want to escape otherwise intractable disputes over political motive attribution, we need to explore human judgment in imaginary social worlds that we can experimentally manipulate in precisely targeted ways that reflect the key conceptual parameters of real-world political debates.

REFERENCES

Adorno, T. W., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D. J., & Sanford, R. N. (1950). The authoritarian personality. New York: Harper and Row.

Arkes, H., & Tetlock, P. E. (2004). Attributions of implicit prejudice, or “Would Jesse Jackson ‘fail’ the Implicit Association Test?,” Psychological Inquiry, 15, 257–278.

Babcock, L., Loewenstein, G., Issacharoff, S., & Camerer, C. (1995). Biased judgments of fairness in bargaining. American Economic Review, 85, 1337–1343.

Bar-Hillel, M., & Yaari, M. (1993). Judgments of distributive justice. In B. A. Mellers & J. Baron (Eds.), Psychological perspectives on justice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Berlin, I. (1990). The crooked timber of humanity. London: John Murray.

Blasi, G., & Jost, J. T. (2006). System justification theory and research: Implications for law, legal advocacy, and social justice. California Law Review, 94, 1119–1168.

Boulding, K. E. (1962). Social justice in social dynamics. In R. B. Brandt (Ed.), Social justice. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Brickman, P. (1977). Preference for inequality. Social Psychology Quarterly, 40, 303–310.

Bukszar, E., & Knetsch, J. L. (1997). Fragile redistribution choices behind a veil of ignorance. Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, 14, 63–74.

Bunge, M. (1961). The weight of simplicity in the construction and assaying of scientific theories. Philosophy of Science, 28, 120–149.

Coleman, S. (2000). Thought experiments and personal identity. Philosophical Studies, 98, 53–69.

Cooper, R. (2005). Thought experiments. Metaphilosophy, 36, 328–347.

Daniels, N. (1996). Justice and justification. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Darley, J. M., & Pittman, T. S. (2003). The psychology of compensatory and retributive justice. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 7, 324–336.

Dennett, D. C. (2003). Who’s on first? Heterophenomenology explained. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 10, 19–30.

Elster, J. (1995). The empirical study of justice. In D. Miller & M. Walzer (Eds.),

Pluralism, justice, and equality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Epley, N., & Caruso, E. M. (2004). Egocentric ethics. Social Justice Research, 17, 171–187.

Ferrie, J. P. (2005). The end of American exceptionalism? Mobility in the United States since 1850. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 19, 199–215.

Fishkin, J. S. (1983). Justice, equal opportunity, and the family. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Fishkin, J. S. (1992). The dialogue of justice. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Fong, C. M. (2004). Which beliefs matter for redistributive politics? Target-specific ver-

sus general beliefs about the causes of income. Unpublished manuscript.

Fong, C. M. (2005). Prospective mobility, fairness, and the demand for redistribution.

Unpublished manuscript.

Fong, C. M., Bowles, S., & Gintis, H. (2006). Strong reciprocity and the welfare state. In J. Mercier-Ythier, S. Kolm, & L. A. Gerard-Varet, Handbook on the economics of giving, reciprocity and altruism (Vol. 2, pp. 1439–1464). Amsterdam: Elsevier.

Forde-Mazrui, K. (2004). Taking conservatives seriously: A moral justification for affirmative action and reparations. California Law Review, 92, 683–754.

Frankfurt, H. (1987). Equality as a moral ideal. Ethics, 98, 21–43.

Friedman, T. H. (2005). The world is flat: A brief history of the twenty-first century.

New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Frohlich, N., & Oppenheimer, J. A. (1992). Choosing justice: An experimental approach to ethical theory. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Frohlich, N., & Oppenheimer, J. A. (1997). A role for structured observations in ethics. Social Justice Research, 10, 1–21.

Frohlich, N., & Oppenheimer, J. A. (2000). How people reason about ethics. In A. Lupia, M. D. McCubbins, & S. L. Popkin, Elements of reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Greenberg, J. (1983). Overcoming egocentric bias in perceived fairness through self-awareness. Social Psychology Quarterly, 46, 152–156.

Haidt, J., & Graham, J. (2007). When morality opposes justice: Conservatives have moral intuitions that liberals may not recognize. Social Justice Research, 20, 98–116.

Haines, E. L., & Jost, J. T. (2000). Placating the powerless: Effects of legitimate and illegitimate explanation on affect, memory, and stereotyping. Social Justice Research, 13, 219–236.

Herrmann, R., Tetlock, P. E., & Diascro, M. (2001). How Americans think about trade: Resolving conflicts among money, power, and principles. International Studies Quarterly, 45, 191–218.

Herrnstein, R., & Murray, C. (1994). The bell curve: Intelligence and class structure in American life. New York: Free Press.

Jost, J. T. (1995). Negative illusions: Conceptual clarification and psychological evidence concerning false consciousness. Political Psychology, 16, 397–424.

Jost, J. T. (1997). An experimental replication of the depressed entitlement effect among women. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 21, 387–393.

Jost, J. T. (2001). Outgroup favoritism and the theory of system justification: An experimental paradigm for investigating the effects of socio-economic success on stereotype content. In G. Moskowitz (Ed.), Cognitive social psychology: The Princeton symposium on the legacy and future of social cognition (pp. 89–102). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Jost, J. T., & Banaji, M. R. (1994). The role of stereotyping in system-justification and the production of false consciousness. British Journal of Social Psychology, 33, 1–27.

Jost, J. T., Banaji, M. R., & Nosek, B. A. (2004). A decade of system justification theory: Accumulated evidence of conscious and unconscious bolstering of the status quo. Political Psychology, 25, 881–919.

Jost, J. T., Blount, S., Pfeffer, J., & Hunyady, G. (2003). Fair market ideology: Its cognitive-motivational underpinnings. Research in Organizational Behavior, 25, 53–91.

Jost, J. T., & Burgess, D. (2000). Attitudinal ambivalence and the conflict between group and system justification motives in low status groups. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 26, 293–305.

Jost, J. T., Fitzsimons, G., & Kay, A. C. (2004). The ideological animal: A system justification view. In J. Greenberg, S. L. Koole, & T. Pyszczynski (Eds.), Handbook of experimental existential psychology (pp. 263–282). New York: Guilford Press.

Jost, J. T., Glaser, J., Kruglanski, A. W., & Sulloway, F. (2003). Political conservatism as motivated social cognition. Psychological Bulletin, 129, 339–375.

Jost, J. T., & Hunyady, O. (2002). The psychology of system justification and the palliative function of ideology. European Review of Social Psychology, 13, 111–153.

Jost, J. T., Pelham, B. W., & Carvallo, M. (2002). Non-conscious forms of system justification: Implicit and behavioral preferences for higher status groups.

Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 586–602.

Jost, J. T., & Thompson, E. P. (2000). Group-based dominance and opposition to equality as independent predictors of self-esteem, ethnocentrism, and social policy attitudes among African Americans and European Americans. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 36, 209–232.

Kahneman, D., Knetsch, J., & Thaler, R. (1986). Fairness as a constraint on profit seeking: Entitlements in the market. The American Economic Review, 76, 728–741.

Kahneman, D., Krueger, A. B., & Schkade, D. (2006). Would you be happier if you were richer? A focusing illusion. Science, 312, 1908–1910.

Kay, A., Jimenez, M. C., & Jost, J. T. (2002). Sour grapes, sweet lemons, and the anticipatory rationalization of the status quo. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 28, 1300–1312.

Kluegel, J. R., Csepeli, G., Kolosi, T., Orkeny, A., & Nemenyi, M. (1995). Accounting for the rich and the poor: Existential justice in comparative perspective. In J. R. Kluegel, D. S. Mason, & B. Wegener (Eds.), Social justice and political change: Public opinion in capitalist and post-communist states. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.

Knobe, J. (in press). What is experimental philosophy? The Philosophers’ Magazine. Konow, J. (2003). Which is the fairest one of all? A positive analysis of justice theo-

ries. Journal of Economic Literature, 41, 1188–1239.

Konow, J. (2005). Blind spots: The effects of information and stakes on fairness bias and dispersion. Social Justice Research, 18, 349–390.

Kunda, Z. (1999). Social cognition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Laswell, H. D. (1930). Psychopathology and politics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Liebig, S. (2001). Lessons from philosophy? Interdisciplinary justice research and two classes of justice judgments. Social Justice Research, 14, 265–287.

Machery, E., Mallon, R., Nichols, S., & Stich, S. P. (2004). Semantics, cross-cultural style. Cognition, 92, B1–B12.

McDermott, R. (1998). Risk-taking in international politics: Prospect theory in American foreign policy. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.

Messick, D. M., & Sentis, K. P. (1983). Fairness, preference, and fairness biases. In D. M. Messick & K. S. Cook (Eds.), Equity theory. New York: Praeger.

Michelbach, P. A., Scott, J. T., Matland, R. E., & Bornstein, B. H. (2003). Doing Rawls justice: An experimental study of income distribution norms. American Journal of Political Science, 47, 523–539.

Miller, D. (1999). Principles of social justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Mills, C. W. (1940). Situated action and vocabularies of motives. American Sociological Review, 5, 904–913.

Mitchell, G., & Tetlock, P. E. (2006). An empirical inquiry into the relation of corrective justice to distributive justice. Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, 3.

Mitchell, G., Tetlock, P. E., Mellers, B. A., & Ordóñez, L. D. (1993). Judgments of social justice: Compromises between equality and efficiency. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 65, 629–639.

Mitchell, G., Tetlock, P. E., Newman, D. G., & Lerner, J. S. (2003). Experiments behind the veil: Structural influences on judgments of social justice. Political Psychology, 24, 519–547.

North, D. C. (1981). Structure and change in economic history. New York: Norton. North, D. C. (2005). Understanding the process of economic change. Princeton, NJ:

Princeton University Press.

Nozick, R. (1974). Anarchy, state, and utopia. New York: Basic Books.

O’Brien, L. T., & Major, B. (2005). System-justifying beliefs and psychological wellbeing: The roles of group status and identity. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 31, 1718–1729.

Ordónez, L., & Mellers, B. A. (1993). Tradeoffs in fairness and preference judgments. In B.A. Mellers & J. Baron, J. (Eds.), Psychological perspectives on justice: Theory and applications (pp. 138–154). New York: Cambridge University Press.

Pillutla, M. M., & Murnighan, J. K. (2003). Fairness in bargaining. Social Justice Research, 16, 241–262.

Rawls, J. (1971). A theory of justice. Cambridge, MA: Belknap.

Redding, R. E. (2004). Bias on prejudice? The politics of research on racial prejudice. Psychological Inquiry, 15, 289–293.

Rubin, M., & Hewstone, M. (2004). Social identity, system justification, and social dominance: Commentary on Reicher, Jost et al., and Sidanius et al. Political Psychology, 25, 823–844.

Rubin, R. E., & Weisberg, J. (2004). In an uncertain world: Tough choices from Wall Street to Washington. New York: Random House.

Scott, J. T., Matland, R. E., Michelbach, P. A., & Bornstein, B. H. (2001). Just deserts: An experimental study of distributive justice norms. American Journal of Political Science, 45, 749–767.

Sidanius, J., Levin, S., Federico, C., & Pratto, F. (2001). Legitimizing ideologies: The social dominance approach. In J. Jost and B. Major (Eds.), The psychology of legitimacy: Emerging perspectives on ideology, justice, and intergroup relations

(pp. 307–331). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Skitka, L. J. (1999). Ideological and attributional boundaries on public compassion: Reactions to individuals and communities affected by a natural disaster.

Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 25, 792–808.

Skitka, L. J., & Tetlock, P. E. (1992). Allocating scarce resources: A contingency model of distributive justice. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 28, 491–522.

Skitka, L. J., & Tetlock, P. E. (1993). Of ants and grasshoppers: The political psychology of allocating public assistance. In B. A. Mellers & J. Baron (Eds.), Psychological perspectives on justice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sniderman, P. M., & Tetlock, P. E. (1986). Symbolic racism: Problems of motive attribution in political analysis. Journal of Social Issues, 42, 129–150.

Souder, L. (2003). What are we to think about thought experiments? Argumentation, 17, 203–217.

Suedfeld, P., & Tetlock, P. E. (Eds.) (1991). Psychology and social policy. Washington, DC: Hemisphere.

Taylor, S. E., & Brown, J. (1988). Illusion and well-being: A social psychological perspective on mental health. Psychological Bulletin, 103, 193–210.

Tetlock, P. E. (1984). Content and structure in political belief systems. In S. Chan & D. Sylvan (Eds.), Foreign policy decision-making: Perception, cognition, and artificial intelligence. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Tetlock, P. E. (1986). A value pluralism model of ideological reasoning. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 50, 819–827.

Tetlock, P. E. (2002). Social-functionalist frameworks for judgment and choice: The intuitive politician, theologian, and prosecutor. Psychological Review, 109, 451–472.

Tetlock, P. E., Armor, D., & Peterson, R. (1994). The slavery debate in antebellum America: Cognitive style, value conflict, and the limits of compromise. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 66, 115–126.

Tetlock, P. E., & Levi, A. (1982). Attribution bias: On the inconclusiveness of the cog- nition-motivation debate. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 18, 68–88.

Tetlock, P. E., & Manstead, A. S. R. (1985). Impression management versus intrapsychic explanations in social psychology: A useful dichotomy? Psychological Review, 92, 59–77.

Tetlock, P. E., & McGuire, C. (1986). Cognitive perspectives on foreign policy. In R. White (Ed.), Psychology and the prevention of nuclear war. New York: Free Press.

Tetlock, P. E., Peterson, R., & Lerner, J. (1996). Revising the value pluralism model: Incorporating social content and context postulates. In C. Seligman, J. Olson, & M. Zanna (Eds.), Ontario symposium on social and personality psychology: Values

(pp. 25–52). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Tetlock, P. E., & Tyler, A. (1996). Winston Churchill’s cognitive and rhetorical style: The debates over Nazi intentions and self-government for India. Political Psychology, 17, 149–170.

Tetlock, P. E., Visser, P., Singh, R., Polifroni, M., Elson, B., Mazzocco, P., & Rescober, P. (2007). People as intuitive prosecutors: The impact of social control motives on attributions of responsibility. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

Wakslak, C., Jost, J. T., Tyler, T. R., & Chen, E. (2007). Moral outrage mediates the dampening effect of system justification on support for redistributive social policies. Psychological Science, 18, 267–274.

Weinrib, E. J. (2002) Corrective justice in a nutshell. University of Toronto Law Journal, 52, 349–356.

motivated to view these systems as just, legitimate, and desirable (see also Eidelman & Crandall, this volume). This is not to say that people will always feel entirely favorable toward the social systems within which they function, but that, all else being equal, they will view these systems more favorably than the objective data may warrant.

According to SJT, system justification tendencies are, in a sense, natural psychological responses instigated to reduce epistemic and existential sources of threat and anxiety—that is, an adaptive, evolved process of psychological coping. Acknowledging that one is forced to conform to the rules, norms, and conventions of a system that is illegitimate, unfair, and undesirable is likely to provoke considerable anxiety and threat (Kay et al., 2008a); it makes perfect sense, therefore, that when little can be done to change this reality (see Laurin & Kay, 2008), people would be highly motivated to view the system as less undesirable, unfair, and illegitimate—that is, to justify or rationalize it. Such a process of coping is akin to several others previously addressed in the social psychological literature, most notably, Festinger’s (1957) theory of cognitive dissonance and Lerner’s (1980) belief in a just world, both of which suggest that when reality does not necessarily fit with our preferred view of it, we can engage in a number of psychological strategies to correct the mismatch.

An important implication of this theoretical position is that societal systems of inequality are not justified solely as the result of the powerful desire to maintain their own position of relative privilege, or people, in general, preferring hierarchy (although it does not deny that these things may also occur). Rather, SJT focuses on the more basic epistemic and existential needs that lead people, regardless of group status, to be motivated to view their social systems (however these systems may be structured) as just, legitimate, and desirable (see Jost & Hunyady, 2002, 2005; Kay et al., 2008a). From this perspective, then, system justification phenomena are not solely the consequences of those in power attempting (consciously or otherwise) to encourage subordinate group members to accept and legitimize their place in the hierarchy (see Sidanius & Pratto, 1999), but also the result of a general motivation to defend and bolster those external systems within which they are forced to operate. Indeed, recent research under the umbrella of SJT has now demonstrated many different ways in which people engage in systemjustifying tendencies that are not easily explicable in terms of specific motivations for social dominance or preferences for hierarchy in general (e.g., Jost, Banaji, & Nosek, 2004; Kay, Jimenez, & Jost, 2002; Kay et al., 2008b; Laurin & Kay, 2008).

Last—and of special importance to the goals of the present chapter— much like other theories of motivated social cognition, SJT suggests that

system-justifying tendencies are context dependent. Cognitive dissonance reduction, for example, becomes much more likely to occur as the perception of free choice on the part of actors increases (Holmes & Strickland, 1970); social identity effects are often highly dependent on contextual variables such as the legitimacy and permeability of group boundaries (for a review, see Brown, 2000); and motivated psychological processes aimed at preserving the belief in a just world, such as victim derogation, are most likely to surface when other options, such as actually helping the victim, are blocked (see Lerner & Miller, 1978). A key focus of this chapter is on demonstrating the similar contextual nature of the system justification motive. In the next section, we theoretically outline the contexts in which the system justification motive is most likely to be active. Afterward, we describe recent research demonstrating how, in these contexts, the system justification motive can lead to the maintenance and perpetuation of inequality, as well as a reduction in attempts at social redress.

THE CONTEXTUAL NATURE OF SYSTEM JUSTIFICATION: CIRCUMSTANCES THAT INCREASE SYSTEM JUSTIFICATION TENDENCIES

Given that the system justification motive is assumed to help people cope with the existential and epistemic threats of being more or less “forced” to operate within a system that one has little control over, it makes sense that certain conditions—in particular, those conditions most likely to exacerbate the potential threat—would be more likely than others to activate this motivation. In our research, we have focused on three facilitating conditions:

(a) perceptions of system threat, (b) perceptions of system inevitability, and

(c) perceptions of system dependence and/or control.

System Threat and Affirmation

Much as self-threat (affirmation) manipulations increase (decrease) the proclivity to engage in self-defensive processes (e.g., Fein & Spencer, 1997; Sherman & Cohen, 2002; Steele, 1988; Steele & Liu, 1983), threatening (affirming) the system justification motive should increase (decrease) the proclivity to engage in processes of system justification (see Hafer, 2000; Jost & Hunyady, 2002; Jost, Kivetz, Rubini, Guermandi, & Mosso, 2005; Kay, Jost, & Young, 2005). This prediction is consistent with recent research demonstrating the extent to which meeting a desired end-state greatly reduces those motivated processes generally used to achieve that end-state (e.g., Förster, Liberman, & Higgins, 2005), and research demonstrating the extent to which blocking pursuit of a particular goal results in increased efforts to reach it (Atkinson & Birch, 1970; Bargh, Gollwitzer, Lee-Chai, Barndollar, &

Troetschel, 2001). Thus, to the extent that a given psychological phenomenon originates from the motive to defend a particular social system, a threat to the legitimacy of that system should increase the need to engage in this phenomenon, and an affirmation of the legitimacy of the system should decrease this need.

Such threats can occur in the real world in many forms, ranging from (the threat of) terrorist attacks to economic turmoil to public criticisms of the legitimacy of a particular system, and so forth (cf. Sales, 1972). In the laboratory, manipulations of system threat or system affirmation generally involve exposing participants to (fictitious) news articles describing someone’s opinion regarding the socio-political climate of a particular system (see Jost et al., 2005; Kay et al., 2005; Lau, Kay, & Spencer, 2008) but research has also, on occasion, involved other threats, such as reminders of terrorism (Ullrich & Cohrs, 2007). In the case of the former, care is generally taken to ensure the threats or affirmations are specific to the system, and do not threaten other related constructs such as selfor group-esteem (see Kay et al., 2005; Laurin & Kay, 2008).

System Inevitability

Motivated rationalizations can occur for many reasons and in many different forms. One factor common to all these, however, appears to be the inevitability of the outcome being rationalized. In studies on cognitive dissonance, people rationalize their past, not future, decisions—presumably because their future decisions are not yet inevitable (e.g., see Blanton, George, & Crocker, 2001). Kay, Jimenez, and Jost (2002) demonstrated that the more likely an outcome was—inevitability being the most extreme form of likelihood—the more likely it was to be justified. Finally, the wide array of effects noted by terror management researchers is presumably due to the overwhelming inevitability of the focus of the terror, namely, death (see Solomon, Greenberg, & Pyszczynski, 2004).

Social systems, once entrenched, are not easily changed. Although they may be less certain than death (and maybe taxes), leaving or changing a social system—whether it be one’s country, religion, family, university, or place of employment—is, in many circumstances, not considered to be a feasible option. Although it is not entirely inevitable, in most circumstances, people are unlikely to be exiting, switching, or changing their social systems any time soon. This is likely a key reason why such systems are so frequently justified and rationalized (Laurin & Kay, 2008). That is, given that people will be somewhat forced to abide by the rules and norms of their systems, and to acknowledge the extent to which their outcomes in life are dependent on these rules and norms, the psychological advantages of not constantly thinking ill of these systems are obvious.