jost_j_t_kay_a_c_thorisdottir_n_social_and_psychological_bas

As Stephen Stills (1970) sang many years ago, “If you can’t be with the one you love . . . love the one you’re with.” Indeed, this folk rocker displayed some excellent social psychological intuition with these lyrics, as decades of social psychological research has since demonstrated that tendencies to rationalize and bolster relationships and relationship partners are determined, in part, by perceptions of the extent to which other romantic options are available (e.g., Rusbult, 1980; Thibaut & Kelley, 1959). Similar processes, we suggest, play a role in dictating the activation of tendencies to rationalize and bolster the broader social systems within which people function.

All else equal, those systems perceived as relatively inevitable are most likely to be defended by their constituents. Two obvious determinants of this are (a) perceptions of the extent to which the system is likely or unlikely to change (that is, its stability) and (b) perceptions of the relative ease or difficulty with which the individual can exit the system and enter a new one (that is, its escapability). Recent research has generally focused on the latter of these, demonstrating the role that perceptions of escapability play in heightening system-justifying tendencies (Laurin & Kay, 2008). The literature we ultimately review, therefore, will also focus on conditions of perceived escapability, rather than perceived stability.

System Dependence and Control

People tend to downplay the role of chance and happenstance in determining social outcomes and prefer to imbue their social worlds with order, reason, and balance (e.g., Heider, 1958; Langer, 1975; Lerner, 1980; Peterson & Seligman, 1984; Taylor & Brown, 1999). As Lerner (1980, p. vii) explained in the preface to his now-classic book, The Belief in a Just World:

We (humans) do not believe that things just happen in our world; there is a pattern to events which conveys not only a sense of orderliness or predictability, but also the compelling experience of appropriateness expressed in the typically implicit judgment, Yes, that is the way it should be.

Several lines of research converge on this notion that people prefer to endorse the belief that events will not randomly befall them—a belief that has been shown to be key to healthy psychological functioning (Biner, Angle, Park, & Mellinger, 1995; Dalbert, 2001; Davis, Sundahl, & Lesbo, 2000; Friedland, Keinan, & Regev, 1992; Langer, 1975; Peterson & Seligman, 1983, 1984; Plaks, Grant, & Dweck, 2005; Rotter, 1990; Taylor & Brown, 1999; Taylor et al., 2000). Psychological theories of religion have often cited the need to believe in a safe, predictable, and fair social world (Allport, 1966; Batson & Stocks, 2004; Weber, 1958), and it has been demonstrated that members of different religions explicitly explain injustices via different models of causality

(Young & Morris, 2004). Finally, research suggests that a crucial psychological consequence of random trauma, such as stranger rape, is the unusually strong challenge these extreme events pose to the view that we live in a fair, nonrandom world (Janoff-Bulman, 1989, 1992, 1998). Traumatic events, it is said, “shatter survivors’ fundamental assumptions about the world” (JanoffBulman & Yopyk, 2004, p. 123). Implicit in this approach is the notion that, until trauma survivors experience these jarring events, they have maintained their beliefs in a predictable and orderly world in which punishments and rewards are doled out fairly.

The main theme across these research programs is that people possess a motivation to view things as predictable, orderly, and under control, as opposed to random and chaotic. The social systems within which people function, it has been suggested, can provide this feeling of order (see Jost & Hunyady, 2002; Kay et al., 2008a). Thus, to the extent that one feels subsumed by a given system—that is, the extent to which he or she operates within its rules and norms and believes her welfare is somewhat dependent on that system—she or he should be motivated to defend it. That is, given that a just system ensures rewards and punishments are distributed rationally and reasonably, as opposed to randomly or haphazardly, not justifying the system would force the individual to acknowledge the role of chance and randomness in his or her life.

This logic leads to the identification of two contextual factors that should increase system justification tendencies. First, the more people feel dependent on a given system—that is, the more it is presumed to be an influence on the social and economic outcomes of an individual’s life—the more they should be motivated to defend and justify it. Indeed, manipulations that increase feelings of system dependence have been demonstrated to increase the defense of those specific systems (Laurin & Kay, 2008).

Second, when feelings of personal control are temporarily decreased, processes of system defense should be heightened—a process we have referred to as compensatory control (Kay et al., 2008a; see also Rothbaum, Weisz, & Snyder, 1982). The logic underlying this prediction is as follows: As we described earlier, people are motivated to perceive control and order and to guard against feelings of randomness and chaos. The primary mode for doing so, at least in Western cultures, is through the belief in personal control. We know from a variety of sources, however, that feelings of personal control tend to fluctuate both situationally and chronically (e.g., Burger, 1989; Burger & Cooper, 1979; Dweck & Leggett, 1988; Iyengar & Lepper, 1999; Ji, Peng, & Nisbett, 2000; Pepitone & Saffiotti, 1997; Rodin, Rennert, & Solomon, 1980; Weisz, Rothbaum, & Blackburn, 1984; Wohl & Enzle, 2003). Given these fluctuations in beliefs about personal control, how

do people maintain their motivated beliefs in an orderly, predictable, and just world? According to the model of compensatory control, we suggest they do so by increasingly relying on external sources of control, such as social systems, to compensate for lowered levels of personal control (Kay et al., 2008a). Such an idea is consistent with the notion that perceptions of personal control may be subsumed under the more general belief that things are under control (Antonovsky, 1979).

Thus, the system justification motive should also be increasingly active under conditions of decreased personal control. Indeed, several studies (which will be described in considerably more detail in a later section) have now demonstrated that situational manipulations designed to temporarily lower feelings of personal control do lead to temporary increases in system justification (Kay et al., 2008a).

Summary

To summarize, then, we have outlined three broad contexts in which the system justification motive will be most likely to surface and impact judgment and behavior. These are (a) situations of heightened system threat, (b) perceptions of system inevitability, and (c) increased feelings of system dependence or lowered feelings of personal control. In this next section, we turn our attention to a discussion of how, in these contexts, the activation of the system justification motive can lead to increased rationalization of inequality and reduced efforts at system redress.

CONSEQUENCES OF THE SYSTEM JUSTIFICATION MOTIVE FOR THE MAINTENANCE OF THE STATUS QUO

As alluded to earlier, we believe that the system justification motive evolved to help people cope with the existential and epistemic threats that can ensue from operating within a social system that is perceived as illegitimate and/or unfair (see Jost & Hunyady, 2002, 2005). From this perspective, the motive is highly adaptive, representing another example of the impressive psychological immune system (Gilbert, Pinel, Wilson, Blumberg, & Wheatley, 1998). From a societal-level perspective, however, the system justification motive has the potential to produce many consequences of more questionable utility. Social systems are not always structured in the most fair or equitable manner; thus, to create more fair social systems, change, evolution, and forward progress are necessary. However, it is easy to imagine how the system justification motive might interrupt this process and, therefore, hinder improvement. That is, the individual motivation to adapt to and rationalize the faults of one’s system is in direct conflict with motivations to change and better it. Although

there are, of course, many instances in which people’s motivations for social change outweigh their individual motivations to justify the status quo, all else being equal, the system justification motive is unlikely to facilitate this process. Acquiescence is especially likely to occur in those contexts (listed earlier) in which system justification needs are most salient to the individual.

Theoretically, the system justification motive can lead to a number of effects that should reduce the proclivity for people to seek systemic changes in the social order. For example, people show a tendency to criticize and derogate those who explicitly challenge the fairness and legitimacy of the social system (Kaiser, Dyrenforth, & Hagiwara, 2006). Such social costs—which may very well be the result of the system justification motive—inevitably decrease the likelihood that people will publicly argue for systemic changes. As another example, it has been demonstrated that the activation of system justifying ideologies—such as “rags to riches” stories—indirectly lead to decreased support for programs aimed at achieving social equality (Wakslak, Jost, Tyler, & Chen, 2007).

In this chapter, we will focus on two broad areas of research that demonstrate the consequences of the system justification motive for the support of social inequality. First, we will describe instances of the general motivation to simply prefer the status quo (that is, whatever form the current regime takes). In this section, the dependent measures of interest will generally be gauging attitudes toward policies and the status quo in general, as opposed to attitudes toward individuals and/or groups. In the second section, we will describe research demonstrating the impact of the system justification motive on perceptions of and attitudes toward different people and groups of varying status and characteristics. In both of these sections, we will focus exclusively on research that demonstrates the contextual nature of such phenomena—that is, demonstrations of when such instances of support for inequality are more and less likely to occur. In doing so, we hope to offer the reader a nuanced understanding of the boundary conditions surrounding these phenomena. Because such approaches to the study of system justification have only recently begun to gain momentum, this will limit our discussion primarily to very recent programs of research.

MOTIVATIONAL BASES AND CONSEQUENCES OF VIEWING WHAT “IS” AS WHAT “OUGHT TO BE”

Although improved, the current state of affairs for women hoping to succeed in high-ranking and prestigious sectors remains bleak. According to the Status of Women Canada, for example, “women occupy only 20 percent of the highest-paid occupations in the corporate sector in Canada, and are

under-represented at senior management levels . . . in Parliament, the upper levels of federal, provincial, territorial and municipal public services, (and) international affairs. . . .” In the United States, the situation is perhaps even worse: as of 2001, women represented only 15.7% of the corporate officers in the 500 largest companies, and a mere 1.1% of the CEOs of the Fortune 1000 (2001 Census of Women Board, Directors of the Fortune 1000). Such a biased social structure presents women with many obvious obstacles to attaining equality, such as a reduced number of mentors, exclusion from networking opportunities, and the like. Beyond such objective barriers, however, this state of affairs may present women with an even more glaring disadvantage: perceptions that this is how it ought to be and, therefore, should not be changed. The system justification motive should make such a process particularly likely to occur (e.g., Jost, 1997). That is, so long as people are obliged to operate within a given structural system—whether it be an implicit or explicit social norm, a policy, or even a law—the system justification motive should lead people to defend it to a greater extent—even when grounds exist for regarding it as unfair. Across several recent programs of research we have determined when such a tendency is more and less likely to occur.

In one such program of research, we have focused on the role of perceptions of system inevitability (operationalized as perceptions of inescapability) in weakening the belief that the system is to blame for gaping societal inequalities (Laurin & Kay, 2008). Across three separate studies (Laurin & Kay, 2008), participants who were first made to believe that it had become increasingly difficult to emigrate out of their country of residence (i.e., Canada)—via an article describing the increasingly tightened immigration laws around the world—became significantly less likely to blame their system for an inequality, such as the gender discrepancy in salary. That is, participants in the high inescapability conditions viewed the system as significantly less culpable for the apparent injustice. Although the control conditions across the three studies differed, the pattern in each was identical: participants deemed the system as less responsible for creating injustice in conditions of high perceived inevitability. This is particularly noteworthy given that, before their judgments were offered in each of these studies, the participants were told that income disparity in gender is not explainable by level of education or job performance.

Given that, in conditions such as these (that is, when the system justification motive is increasingly engaged), the system is seen as less culpable for creating inequality, it is likely that people will also be much less likely to support policies aimed at correcting the system. Experimental evidence supports this contention. In particular, Laurin and Kay (2008) have demonstrated that the same inescapability manipulation that led participants to view the

system as less blameworthy in the experiments just described also, in a separate study, led participants to report less support for social programs aimed at helping the disadvantaged (programs such as soup kitchens, mentorships for disadvantaged youth, job training, and the like; see Wakslak et al., 2007). Thus, not only do manipulations of perceived system inevitability—that is, manipulations of the system justification motive—lead to increased defense of the system’s role in generating inequality, but they also produce a decreased willingness to support policies aimed at fixing inequality.

Support for the status quo, and reduced motivation to change, have also been observed following other manipulations of the system justification motive. Manipulations of system dependency have been found to lead participants to be more forgiving of the system in the context of societal inequalities, to more strongly endorse current unjust and inequitable public policies, and to more strongly resist policy change. In one such study (Kay et al., 2008a), participants were led to believe that their welfare (that is, their degree of social and economic success) was dependent on either the federal government or their university. Afterwards, participants were told about a group-based inequality that existed either at the national level (i.e., unequal federal funding across the various provinces) or within their university (i.e., unequal university funding across the various departments). As expected, participants justified whichever system on which they were temporarily made to feel dependent. Those participants who were told their welfare depended on the federal system viewed the nation-level inequality as less unjust than the university-level inequality. Those participants who were told their welfare depended on the university, however, showed the opposite pattern: they viewed the university inequality as less unfair than the nationlevel inequality.

In another experiment (Kay et al., 2008b), participants were told about a particular public policy, namely, that the department of education had decided to distribute funds to various institutions based on performance (rather than principles of equality). The participants in this study were all university students at a public university in Ontario, Canada. To manipulate the extent to which these participants were dependent upon this policy, one-third were told that it was relevant only to universities in Ontario (high dependence), one-third were told it was relevant only to high-schools in Ontario (low dependence), and one-third were told it was relevant only to universities in the state of New York (low dependence). Participants were then asked a series of questions gauging their views of the policy’s legitimacy, as well as their desire to leave it as is or to have it altered. Compared to the two low-dependency conditions, participants viewed the policy as significantly more ideal and legitimate and were more resistant to changes to it when it

governed their lives—that is, in the high-dependency condition. In addition, the effect of the system dependency manipulation on resistance to change was entirely mediated by views of the policy’s legitimacy.

Thus, once again, we have observed that conditions that are theoretically tied to the activation of the system justification motive have profound effects on preferences for the status quo and the maintenance of inequality. Manipulations of system dependence produce increased support for the status quo (Kay et al., 2008b), less concern for inequality (Kay et al., 2008a), and decreased interest in social change (Kay et al., 2008a; Kay et al., 2008b).

Before proceeding to the next section of this chapter, it is worth noting that manipulations of system threat and personal control—both of which are presumed to activate the system justification motive—have also been shown to lead to general increases in support for the status quo. Ullrich and Cohrs (2007), for example, demonstrated that, following reminders of the threat of terrorism, participants demonstrated considerably more support for the status quo on a translated version of the Kay and Jost (2003) system justification scale (sample items include: “In general, you find society to be fair” and “Most policies tend to serve the greater good”). Given that scores on this scale tend to be negatively correlated with willingness to engage in activities aimed at social redress, such as addressing postcards to their regional political representative (Kay, Gaucher, & Laurin, 2008), this phenomenon has obvious implications for the maintenance of inequality. Likewise, Kay and colleagues (2008a) demonstrated that a manipulation designed to induce lower feelings of personal control led to significantly higher rates of resistance to changes in the federal system of government. That is, participants first exposed to a reminder of instances in which they were unable to exert personal control subsequently reported less support for altering the governmental system.

Summary

Across several different manipulations designed to increase the strength of the system justification motive—that is, manipulations of system inevitability, system dependence, system threat, and personal control—substantial evidence suggests that the system justification motive can lead to both increased support for the status quo and, relatedly, decreased support for social change. Although support for one’s system surely has many positive societal (see Feygina & Tyler, this volume) and individual (Jost & Hunyady, 2002) consequences, in situations in which the system is even partly responsible for creating or perpetuating inequality (as can be the case with segregated schools/neighborhoods, inflexible maternity leave policies, discriminatory hiring practices, differential funding policies, and the like), the consequences of this tendency are significant indeed.

We would like to remind the reader, however, that we are not suggesting that the system justification motive will never allow for system change or a rejection of unfair system-level procedures. Indeed, Title IX legislation—which made illegal any discrimination on the basis of gender in federally funded educational institutions—is an excellent example that such change can occur. Rather, we are suggesting that, in the various contexts in which the system justification motive is most likely to rear its head, the likelihood of people fighting to change the status quo is considerably reduced.

CONSEQUENCES OF THE SYSTEM

JUSTIFICATION MOTIVE FOR INTERPERSONAL

AND INTERGROUP PERCEPTION

In the previous section we described evidence documenting when people are most likely to show increased support for their overarching socio-political systems—that is, when they will be more and less likely to exonerate the system from any blame in generating inequality, and when they will be more and less likely to resist changing it. System justification phenomena, however, can also occur in more indirect ways. When confronted with issues of unfairness and inequality, a particularly common way of defending the system is by finding other targets to blame for the relevant injustice. Most notably, these other “targets” tend to be the victims of the injustice themselves (see Lerner, 1980; Napier, Mandisodza, Andersen, & Jost, 2006). Indeed, assigning traits, characteristics, or competencies to a given individual or group as a mode of justification is perhaps the most widely documented process of social justification in the field of social psychology.

The most obvious example of interpersonal perception as a means for justification is victim-derogation, in which individuals or groups who suffer due to a given inequality or putative injustice are attributed traits and characteristics that portray them as deserving of their fate (see also Hafer & Bègue, 2005). From a system justification perspective, such a tendency is a particularly effective means of system justification, insofar as it deflects blame away from the system and toward individuals (see Kay et al., 2005; Napier et al., 2006). In fact, SJT largely originated from observations of this tendency—that is, observations of the general tendency for both lowand high-status group members to attribute more competence to members of high-status groups and less competence to members of low-status groups (Jost, 2001; Jost & Banaji, 1994; also see Fiske, Cuddy, Glick, & Xu, 2002 and, for an individual differences approach to similar phenomena, see O’Brien & Major, this volume, and Oldmeadow & Fiske, 2007).

Several recent programs of research have supported the presumed role of the system justification motive in producing these types of phenomena, while also demonstrating when they will be most and least likely to occur. Research on the effects of perceived inevitability is an excellent example. In the studies described earlier on the effects of perceived inevitability on system blame (Laurin & Kay, 2008), for instance, participants were not only asked to judge the extent to which they faulted the system for producing the relevant gender inequalities, but they were also asked to judge the extent to which these differences in economic status reflect genuine differences between men and women. Across all three studies, the same pattern of data was obtained: Participants led to believe the system was less escapable—that is, those participants who were told that it was becoming increasingly more difficult to emigrate—were significantly more likely to attribute the difference in pay between men and women as due to genuine differences between the sexes (as opposed to unfairness in the system). When participants were led to believe that it would be relatively easy to leave their system, however, this pattern of victim blame disappeared.

Similar findings of heightened victim blame have also been observed following other manipulations tied to the system justification motive. For example, following a manipulation of system threat—e.g., exposure to an article written by a foreign journalist who criticized the economic and social state of the participants’ country of residence—participants attributed less intelligence to the powerless and more laziness to the obese (Kay et al., 2005; see also Jost et al., 2005; McCoy & Major, 2007). This general effect also applies to judgments of specific individuals, rather than groups. In one such experiment (Kay et al., 2008b), participants were informed that their female experimenter was pursuing an MBA degree. This was communicated in the context of a previous manipulation informing participants that women were either hugely or minimally under-represented in the business world, as well as a manipulation of system threat. Afterwards, participants rated the experimenter’s performance at smoothly and efficiently running the experiment (in an anonymous, sealed questionnaire that the participants believed was being sent directly to the experimenter’s MBA advisor). As expected, participants in the large inequality condition rated the experimenter’s performance as significantly worse if they were first exposed to a manipulation of system threat. That is, in the context of specific beliefs regarding female under-representation in the business world, participants increasingly derogated the performance of this specific female experimenter following system threat. Importantly, for those participants who were led to believe that the gender disparity was considerably smaller, no similar effect of system threat emerged (see also McCoy & Major, 2007).

Victim derogation, however, is not the only manner in which the system justification motive can influence processes of interpersonal perception and judgment. Other recent research has demonstrated the system-justifying function of complementary stereotyping; that is, stereotypes that attribute specific positive traits or characteristics to disadvantaged groups and specific negative traits or characteristics to advantaged groups (Glick & Fiske, 2001; Jost & Kay, 2005; Kay & Jost, 2003; Kay et al., 2007). The theoretical assertion here is that such stereotypes, which portray an overall balance between the positive and negative consequences of being in highand low-status groups, serve to justify the system by reminding people that the system ensures everything will “balance out in the end” (see also Lane, 1959/2003; Lerner, 1980). The original work in this domain demonstrated straightforwardly that the activation of such stereotypes does serve to increase perceptions of system legitimacy. For example, exposure to positive (but paternalistic, see Jackman, 1994 and Vescio, Gervais, Snyder, & Hoover, 2005) stereotypes concerning women—such as those that portray women as more communal and/or those that portray them in line with benevolent sexist ideals (see Glick & Fiske, 2001)—leads women to view the current system of gender relations, and the status quo in general, as more fair and legitimate (Jost & Kay, 2005). Similarly, exposing individuals to exemplars of poor people who are more happy and/or honest than their rich counterparts also leads to increased satisfaction with the status quo (Kay & Jost, 2003).

More recent experiments have focused on when such phenomena are more and less likely to occur. Kay, Jost, and Young (2005), for example, demonstrated that the tendency to ascribe positive characteristics to low-status groups (i.e., the obese) and negative characteristics to high-status groups (i.e., the powerful) were more pronounced following a manipulation of system threat. Expanding on this, other research has demonstrated that similar processes also apply to preferences for romantic partners. Under the guise of an experiment on Internet dating preferences, Lau and colleagues (2008) demonstrated that, following system threat, men are more interested in dating (and are more physically attracted to) women who portray themselves in a manner that is consistent with ideals of benevolent sexism (that is, as culturally refined, traditional, pure, etc.). Thus, not only do people (in contexts of heightened system justification needs) view people in more complementary stereotypical terms, but they also appear to prefer those who conform to these stereotypes (see also Rudman & Kilianski, 2000).

Last, we would like to briefly describe some recent research examining a separate phenomenon of interpersonal perception that is likely related to the system justification motive and that is especially relevant to the overarching concerns of the book, namely, judgments of political figures. Given that people