Addressing Evidential and Theoretical Inconsistencies in System-Justification Theory with a Social Identity Model of System Attitudes

Evidence for System Justification

Some evidence supports the view that members of disadvantaged groups sometimes act against their self- and group interests (for reviews, see Jost et al., 2004; Jost, Gaucher, & Stern, 2015). For example, research on system justification has focused on the tendency for members of low-status groups to show a preferential bias in favor of higher status out-groups (Jost et al., 2004). This out-group favoritism is thought to be so ingrained in the psyche of members of low-status groups that it even occurs at the implicit unconscious level (Jost et al., 2004; Jost, Pietrzak, Liviatan, Mandisodza, & Napier, 2007). Other research has focused on volitional outcomes, such as political inertia among the relatively deprived (Jost et al., 2012; Osborne & Sibley, 2013) or enhanced ideological support for the status quo among members of disadvantaged communities relative to more privileged groups (Henry & Saul, 2006). Indeed, evidence suggests that these processes are ostensibly driven by a need to retain the prevailing order (Jost et al., 2010).

More recently, research has investigated SJT’s distinctive prediction that system justification should be most apparent among members of disadvantaged groups—the status legitimacy hypothesis (Brandt, 2013). The evidence for this hypothesis has been mixed; some studies yielded a positive result (Henry & Saul, 2006; Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski, & Sulloway, 2003), and others found no supportive evidence (Brandt, 2013; Caricati, 2017; Kelemen, Szabó, Mészáros, László, & Forgas, 2014; Trump & White, 2015). A potential explanation for these mixed results is that measurements of system justification have been too broad and not tied closely enough to the specific hierarchical systems in which high- and low-status groups are embedded (Sengupta, Osborne, & Sibley, 2015). However, this account fails to explain why the status legitimacy hypothesis is unsupported when measurement specificity has been taken into account (e.g., Owuamalam, Rubin, & Issmer, 2016). It is likely that the mixed evidence is the result of theoretical issues rather than measurement issues (Klein, 2014), and it is to these theoretical issues that we now turn.

Theoretical Dissonance with Cognitive Dissonance Theory

A Social Identity Model of System Attitudes

Recent research has found that system justification can sometimes be explained in terms of protecting group interests (Caricati & Sollami, 2017; Owuamalam, Rubin, & Issmer, 2016, Study 1; Owuamalam et al., 2017)—findings that are directly opposed to SJT. These issues have inspired an unfolding series of alternative explanations of system-justification effects that we have collected together in a social identity model of system attitudes, or SIMSA. SIMSA is an umbrella model that integrates a series of explanations based on social identity for why members of disadvantaged groups may, at times, passively or actively support social hierarchies and societal systems that seem, at first glance, to disadvantage their social identities.

As shown in Figure 1, SIMSA provides more parsimonious explanations of system justification than does SJT, because it does not invoke a separate system-justification motive but instead develops previous insights from SIT (Tajfel & Turner, 1979). First, people may reflect the reality of social hierarchies by acknowledging that, on specific status-related dimensions, high-status out-groups are better than low-status in-groups (Rubin & Hewstone, 2004; Spears et al., 2001). For example, people with a low socioeconomic status (SES) may acknowledge that people with a higher SES have better education and income. This acknowledgment represents a tacit or passive acceptance of social reality rather than an active endorsement or “justification” of the intergroup hierarchy. In such a situation, the adoption of socially creative strategies to manage one’s reputation and devalued social identity are also likely to be apparent (Owuamalam, Rubin, & Issmer, 2016; Tajfel & Turner, 1979).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Fig. 1.

The social identity model of system attitudes (SIMSA). The explanations in the blocks largely concern system support among people who are strongly identifying members of low-status groups when social stratification is perceived to be legitimate.

Second, people may interpret the overarching system (e.g., the country) to be an extension of the in-group (which includes the higher status out-group) and, consequently, engage in in-group bias (Rubin & Hewstone, 2004). For example, low-SES people may perceive subsystems (e.g., health care, democratic values and institutions) in their country to be better than similar systems in other countries (e.g., Rubin, 2016).

Finally, people may justify systems as fair and equitable in order to support their hope that, in the longer term, the system may allow their group to improve its social status (Owuamalam, Rubin, & Issmer, 2016). For example, low-SES people may perceive the SES system to be fair in order to support their perception that the system will allow them, or their children, to improve their education and income in the future. Note that, in order to operationalize this hope-for-future-in-group-status route to system justification, SIMSA distinguishes between short-term stability and long-term stability (Owuamalam, Rubin, & Issmer, 2016; Owuamalam et al., 2017). Social systems that are stable in the short term cannot be altered through group members’ current actions (Tajfel & Turner, 1979) but may, nonetheless, be amenable to change in the longer term. In contrast, social systems that are stable in the long term (e.g., a caste system) cannot be altered through group members’ current or future actions. If a social system is perceived to be stable in the short term but unstable in the long term, then people who are currently disadvantaged by that system may be motivated to view it as fair and just, or at least usable, in order to validate their belief that the system will benefit them in the future.

This is precisely what Owuamalam, Rubin, and Issmer (2016, Study 2) found in the context of a legitimate university-ranking system in Australia. Students at the University of Newcastle were exposed to a manipulation that ranked their university relatively lower than the Australian National University. Those who strongly identified with the university supported the ranking system more strongly when they also were led to believe that this system was unstable in the long term, compared with students who were told that positions within the system were relatively fixed in the long term. This finding is contrary to SJT but is consistent with SIMSA: Students who were led to believe that the ranking system was unstable in the long term were also most hopeful that their university’s ranking would increase in the future.

It is also noteworthy that the alternative to accepting a social system is to reject it; in most cases, such a rejection is likely to be regarded as being unrealistic because it implies a revolution and anarchy that could invoke much greater uncertainty and threat than the alternative of dealing with dissonance. Hence, people who are invested in their group identities and interests may choose to explore all options for group advancement in the prevailing system before considering the revolutionary road of system rejection. Thus, although a key principle for SJT is that uncertainty and dissonance drive support for the system, we think that rejecting the system is potentially more threatening, which is precisely why strong group identifiers may be most likely to avoid it and pursue the hope of change within the system.

Moving Forward: System Justification Without the System-Justification Motive?

SJT sets the stage for the study of system attitudes by documenting a series of seemingly theoretically anomalous findings that competing frameworks, such as SIT, are presumed to be ill-equipped to handle (e.g., out-group favoritism, the tendency for low-status groups to hold evaluative biases in favor of higher status out-groups). However, a number of the conditions under which system justification is predicted to occur for low-status groups (i.e., weak personal and group motives, stable social hierarchies) are exactly those conditions under which the system-justification motive should be at its weakest from the perspective of cognitive dissonance. These theoretical inconsistencies are compounded by correspondingly weak evidence for SJT’s most distinctive predictions (e.g., Brandt, 2013, Caricati, 2017).

One approach to these theoretical and empirical discrepancies is to try to assimilate them into a theoretical paradigm that continues to assume the existence of a separate system-justification motive. An alternative approach is to expand that paradigm to include group motives as potential drivers of system-justification phenomena. We adopt this second approach. Specifically, we complement SJT with SIT-based insights to offer SIMSA, which can account for both passive and active support for social hierarchies in a theoretically consistent manner and without recourse to the theoretically problematic notion of an independent system-justification motive. In these respects, we believe that SIMSA plugs some of the theoretical and empirical holes in SJT and offers a new SIT-based perspective for developing re-search in this important area.

Recommended Reading

Jost, J. T., Becker, J., Osborne, D., & Badaan, V. (2017). Missing in (collective) action: Ideology, system justification, and the motivational antecedents of two types of protest behavior. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 26, 99–108. doi:10.1177/0963721417690633. A recent clarification of the system justification perspective concerning social change and stasis.

Laurin, K., Gaucher, D., & Kay, A. (2013). Stability and the justification of social inequality. European Journal of Social Psychology, 43, 246–254. doi:10.1002/ejsp.1949. The evidence on which system-justification-stability assumption is based.

Proulx, T., Inzlicht, M., & Harmon-Jones, E. (2012). Understanding all inconsistency compensation as a palliative response to violated expectations. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 16, 285–291. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2012.04.002. Consult for a potential connection between system justification and broader theories of psychological meaning.

Starmans, C., Sheskin, M., & Bloom, P. (2017). Why people prefer unequal societies. Nature Human Behaviour, 1, Article 0082. doi:10.1038/s41562-017-0082. This article makes an important, but often ignored argument that acceptance of social inequality may not necessarily equate to the acceptance of unfair systems.