The system justification conundrum: Re-examining the cognitive dissonance basis for system justification (original) (raw)
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European Journal of Social Psychology, 2003
According to system justification theory, people are motivated to preserve the belief that existing social arrangements are fair, legitimate, justifiable, and necessary. The strongest form of this hypothesis, which draws on the logic of cognitive dissonance theory, holds that people who are most disadvantaged by the status quo would have the greatest psychological need to reduce ideological dissonance and would therefore be most likely to support, defend, and justify existing social systems, authorities, and outcomes. Variations on this hypothesis were tested in five US national survey studies. We found that (a) low-income respondents and African Americans were more likely than others to support limitations on the rights of citizens and media representatives to criticize the government; (b) low-income Latinos were more likely to trust in US government officials and to believe that 'the government is run for the benefit of all' than were high-income Latinos; (c) low-income respondents were more likely than high-income respondents to believe that large differences in pay are necessary to foster motivation and effort; (d) Southerners in the USA were more likely to endorse meritocratic belief systems than were Northerners and poor and Southern African Americans were more likely to subscribe to meritocratic ideologies than were African Americans who were more affluent and from the North; (e) low-income respondents and African Americans were more likely than others to believe that economic inequality is legitimate and necessary; and (f) stronger endorsement of meritocratic ideology was associated with greater satisfaction with one's own economic situation. Taken together, these findings are consistent with the dissonance-based argument that people who suffer the most from a given state of affairs are paradoxically the least likely to question, challenge, reject, or change it. Implications for theories of system justification, cognitive dissonance, and social change are also discussed.
British Journal of Social Psychology, 2018
Since first being proposed 25 years ago, system justification theory has become a paradigm‐shifting framework for understanding intergroup relations and political psychology. Based on the thesis that people are motivated to defend and bolster the societal status quo, system justification theory helps to explain varied phenomena, including resistance to change, outgroup favouritism, and other instances of false consciousness. This paper summarizes four tenets of the theory including the following: (1) antecedents to system justification, (2) palliative effects of system justification, (3) status‐based asymmetries in conflict between justification motives, and (4) societal consequences of system justification. Throughout our review, we highlight how system justification theory helps to explain why disadvantaged groups might sometimes support the status quo, emphasizing research conducted outside the United States when possible. We conclude by calling on future research to (1) further ...
System justification among the disadvantaged: A triadic social stratification perspective
Frontiers in Psychology, 2020
For the past 25 years, the field of social and political psychology has embraced the idea that humans possess a special system justification motivation which causes even members of disadvantaged groups to support societal systems that ostensibly operate against their personal and group interests. Recently, this system justification motive explanation has been challenged, based on mounting empirical evidence to the contrary. However, the potential demise of this dominant perspective invites explanations for the system justification phenomenon, especially amongst the disadvantaged. Existing interest-based accounts, such as the social identity model of system attitudes have tried to fill this gap, but have generally focused on system rationalisation processes within dyadic systems that pitch disadvantaged groups against their privileged counterparts alone. The current contribution extends the existing interest-based accounts by explaining system justification effects in multi-stratified social systems. Based on the triadic social stratification theory, we propose that system justification among the disadvantaged may result from favourable inter-status comparisons within a multi-stratified social system.
European Review of Social Psychology, 2023
System justification theory (SJT) assumes that social identity theory (SIT) cannot fully account for system justification by members of low-status (disadvantaged) groups. Contrary to this claim, we provide several elaborations of SIT that explain when and why members of low-status groups show system justification independent from any separate system justification motive. According to the social identity model of system attitudes (SIMSA), the needs for social accuracy and a positively distinct social identity fully account for system justification by members of low-status groups. In the present article, we (a) explain SIMSA's accounts of system justification, (b) develop associated hypotheses, (c) summarise evidence that supports each hypothesis, and (d) highlight issues to be addressed in future research. We conclude that SIMSA provides a more parsimonious explanation of system justification by the disadvantaged than SJT, because it does not refer to an additional separate system justification motive.
British Journal of Social Psychology, 2019
Do the disadvantaged have an autonomous system justification motivation that operates against their personal and group interests? System justification theory (SJT; Jost & Banaji, 1994) proposes that they do, and that this motivation helps to (a) reduce cognitive dissonance and associated uncertainties and (b) soothe the pain that is associated with knowing that one’s group is subject to social inequality. However, 25 years of research on this system justification motivation has given rise to several theoretical and empirical inconsistencies. The present article argues that these inconsistencies can be resolved by a social identity model of system attitudes (SIMSA; Owuamalam, Rubin, & Spears, 2018). SIMSA assumes that instances of system justification are often in alignment with (rather than opposed to) the interests of the disadvantaged. According to SIMSA, the disadvantaged may support social systems (a) in order to acknowledge social reality, (b) when they perceive the wider social system to constitute a superordinate ingroup, and (c) because they hope to improve their ingroup’s status through existing channels in the long run. These propositions are corroborated by existing and emerging evidence. We conclude that SIMSA offers a more coherent and parsimonious explanation for system justification than does SJT.
Editorial: Exploring system justification phenomenon among disadvantaged individuals
Frontiers in Psychology, 2023
The question of why (or even when) the disadvantaged might be more or less supportive of existing social arrangements is a matter of debate amongst social and political psychologists (e.g., Passini, 2019; Jost, 2020, see also Rubin et al., 2022). Accordingly, for this Research Topic, we chose a title that was deliberately broad in scope, accommodating several aspects that included: (a) the drivers of system justification; (b) the socio-structural conditions that enhance or dampen system justification, (c) the ideological correlates of system support, and (d) the impact of system justification on wellbeing. Taken together, the contributions comprised in this Research Topic provide a comprehensive analysis of these four issues.
Current Directions in Psychological Science, 2018
System justification theory (SJT; Jost & Banaji, 1994) proposes that people have an inherent motive to support societal systems, even at the expense of their personal and group interests. However, the evidence for this system justification motive is mixed, and a close examination of the relevant propositions yields some important theoretical inconsistencies. To address this mixed evidence and theoretical inconsistency, we introduce a social identity model of system attitudes (SIMSA). SIMSA integrates a cluster of different social identity processes and proposes that system justification can occur among members of low-status groups (a) due to a passive reflection of social reality, (b) as a form of ingroup bias (at the superordinate level), and (c) in the hope that ingroup advancement is possible in the future within the prevailing system. It is concluded that SIMSA provides a more comprehensive and theoretically-consistent explanation of system justification than SJT.
Social identity explanations of system justification: Misconceptions, criticisms, and clarifications
European Review of Social Psychology, 2023
In this article, we reply to Jost et al.’s (2023) rejoinder to our article reviewing evidence for the social identity model of system attitudes (SIMSA; Rubin et al., 2023). We argue that (1) SIMSA treats system justification as the outcome of an interaction between general social psychological process and specific historical, political, cultural, and ideological environments; (2) it does not conflate perceived intergroup status differences with the perceived stability and legitimacy of those differences, (3) it is not fatalistic, because it assumes that people may engage in social change when they perceive an opportunity to do so; (4) it adopts a non-reductionist, social psychological explanation of system justification, rather than an individualist explanation based on individual differences; (5) it presupposes “existing social arrangements”, including their existing legitimacy and stability, and assumes that these social arrangements are either passively acknowledged or actively supported; and (6) it is not reliant on minimal group experiments in its evidence base.
Acta Psychologica, 2023
Members of disadvantaged groups sometimes support societal systems that enable the very inequalities that disadvantaged them. Is it possible to explain this puzzling system-justifying orientation in terms of rational groupinterested motives, without recourse to a separate system motive? The social identity model of system attitudes (SIMSA) claims that it is. SIMSA proposes that the system justification shown by a disadvantaged group (e.g., African American women) can sometimes support identity needs that are tied to a more inclusive (superordinate) in-group (e.g., Americans). There is already some supportive evidence for this proposition, but it is not yet clear whether: (1) such trends are visible in a wider range of disadvantaged contexts, and (2) this explanation also applies to those who are strongly invested in their subgroup (e.g., feminists). In two waves of a large nationally representative survey from 21 to 23 European states (N total = 84,572) and two controlled experiments (N total = 290 women), we found that: (a) system justification was positively associated with superordinate ingroup identification across multiple cases of disadvantage (Studies 1-3), (b) system justification increased when this inclusive identity was made more salient (Studies 2 & 3), and (c) system justification was visible even amongst feminists when they activated their superordinate (Italian) identity (Study 3).
British Journal of Social Psychology, 2019
The debate between the proponents of SIMSA and SJT does not pivot on whether system justification occurs – we all agree that system justification does occur. The issue is why it occurs? System justification theory (SJT; Jost & Banaji, 1994) assumes that system justification is motivated by a special system justification motive. In contrast, the social identity model of system attitudes (SIMSA; Owuamalam, Rubin, & Spears, 2018) argues that there is insufficient conclusive evidence for this special system motive, and that system justification can be explained in terms of social identity motives, including the motivation to accurately reflect social reality and the search for a positive social identity. Here, we respond to criticisms of SIMSA, including criticisms of its social reality, ingroup bias and hope for future ingroup status explanations of system justification. We conclude that SJT theorists should decide whether system justification is oppositional to, or compatible with social identity motives, and that this dilemma could be resolved by relinquishing the theoretically problematic notion of a system justification motivation.