A Decade of System Justification Theory: Accumulated Evidence of Conscious and Unconscious Bolstering of the Status Quo

Abstract

Most theories in social and political psychology stress self-interest, intergroup conflict, ethnocentrism, homophily, ingroup bias, outgroup antipathy, dominance, and resistance. System justification theory is influenced by these perspectives-including social identity and social dominance theories-but it departs from them in several respects. Advocates of system justification theory argue that (a) there is a general ideological motive to justify the existing social order, (b) this motive is at least partially responsible for the internalization of inferiority among members of disadvantaged groups, (c) it is observed most readily at an implicit, nonconscious level of awareness and (d) paradoxically, it is sometimes strongest among those who are most harmed by the status quo. This article reviews and integrates 10 years of research on 20 hypotheses derived from a system justification perspective, focusing on the phenomenon of implicit outgroup favoritism among members of disadvantaged groups (including African Americans, the elderly, and gays/lesbians) and its relation to political ideology (especially liberalism-conservatism).KEY WORDS: ideology, system justification, intergroup relations, implicit bias There is a cluster of related theories that are by now so prevalent in social science that they strike the contemporary reader as self-evidently true. Although these theories are by no means indistinguishable, they share a set of common features, including the tenets that groups serve their own interests, develop ideolo-

Hierarchy in the eye of the beholder: (Anti-)egalitarianism shapes perceived levels of social inequality.

“…19 First, it supports theoretical perspectives arguing that individuals' views about the social system are shaped not only by the social standing of the groups to which they belong (Tajfel & Turner, 1979), but also by their ideological motives (Sidanius & Pratto, 1999;Jost et al, 2004). Thus, high SDO subordinate group members under-perceive hierarchy despite the fact that it is not in their group interest to do so, consistent with the argument in system justification theory that disadvantaged group members are sometimes motivated to defend the societal status quo that disadvantages them (Jost, Banaji, & Nosek 2004; see also Sidanius & Pratto, 1999, for a discussion of 'behavioral asymmetry', which describes how members of low status groups sometimes hold beliefs or behave in ways that harm the ingroup). Second, this finding is also consistent with the view that SDO reflects generalized support for hierarchy rather than simply reflecting desire for the dominance of the ingroup (i.e., Ho et al, 2015;Pratto & Stewart, 2012).…”

Young children seek out biased information about social groups

“…However, future work should consider whether children seek out information that conforms to their pre-conceived ideas and stereotypes of real-world groups rather than information that contradicts those preconceived ideas and stereotypes; an affirmative answer might suggest that children's information seeking also functions to justify and legitimatize the existing social order, in line with work with adults (e.g. Jost, Banaji, & Nosek, 2004).…”

“…To offer just one example, it has been suggested that members of collectivist cultures show weaker preferences in minimal group experiments than those described in these studies (Falk, Heine, & Takemura, 2013), raising the question of whether children from such cultures would make similar choices in our paradigm. These findings could also be examined across other dimensions of participant variation such as social status: would children from disadvantaged groups also selectively seek out ingroup-favoring information, or might they, under some circumstances, seek out information that supports culturally consensual views of their own group as lower in status (cf System Justification Theory: Jost et al, 2004).…”

The Sensemaking-Coevolution-Implementation Theory of software design

“…SCI may also inform development of an antecedent theory of design project success. For example, SCI suggests that success may depend on the proportion of the design space explored through Coevolution, which may be affected by cognitive biases (cf., Stacy and MacMillan 1995) including confirmation bias (Oswald and Grosjean 2004) and status quo bias (Jost et al 2004). …”