Since the U.S. military invasion of Puerto Rico in 1898, the Caribbean island has been an “unincorporated territory” of the United States. Today, the island faces the worst economic, political, and humanitarian crisis in its modern history. Despite major disadvantages associated with the present situation, many Puerto Ricans continue to support U.S. hegemonic rule by either maintaining the territorial status quo or calling for a full annexation of Puerto Rico as a U.S. state. To better understand these attitudes, we synthesized insights from decolonial theory and system justification perspectives and administered surveys to 344 adults in San Juan, P.R. from 2017 to 2019. Results revealed that, as hypothesized, internalization of inferiority (outgroup favoritism) and epistemic motivation (need for cognitive closure) were associated with Puerto Ricans’ justification of the colonial system. Furthermore, colonial system justification was a significant mediator of the effects of internalization of inferiority and epistemic motivation on support for the territorial status quo and U.S. statehood—as well as rejection of national independence. Implications of these findings and the relevance of the overarching theoretical framework for the study of cultural and political psychology in other colonial and “post‐colonial” contexts are discussed.

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Among Puerto Ricans, support for U.S. statehood (i.e. the complete annexation of Puerto Rico as the 51st state of the United States) has been linked to an internalized sense of inferiority, colonial system justification and political conservatism. However, no research has explored this question from the perspective of U.S. Americans. We analyse the role that the dual colonial ideologies of historical negation (of colonial injustices) and symbolic exclusion (of the colonial subjects) have in explaining support for Puerto Rico's statehood and other political status options for Puerto Rico among U.S. Americans, applying a decolonial adaptation of the Dark Duo Model of Post-Colonial Ideology (DDM). Confirmatory factor analyses validate the factor structure of our adaptation of the DDM scale in an MTurk sample (N = 435) and two student samples (N = 578; N = 381). Latent profile analyses uncover two distinct ideological groups that tend to support Puerto Rican statehood: a 'pro-egalitarian' group committed to both cultural inclusion and material aid for Puerto Rico and a 'neo-colonial' group equally open to cultural inclusion but opposed to material aid. We discuss how symbolic cultural politics, not an egalitarian commitment to material aid aimed at redressing colonial injustices, underlie support for the annexation of Puerto Rico among a significant group of U.S. Americans.