Abstract
System Justification Among the Disadvantaged: A Triadic Social Stratification Perspective.
Highlights
Reviewed by: Sabine Glock, University of Wuppertal, Germany David Trafimow, New Mexico State University, United States
The outgroup favoritism phenomenon is described as “system-justifying” because such tendencies have the potential to entrench social inequality, especially when these attitudes are held by people who are disadvantaged in the prevailing order
We are neither proposing a general theory of intergroup relations, nor is the goal here to explain all instances of system justification amongst the disadvantaged
Summary
The system justification theory (SJT; Jost and Banaji, 1994) recognizes—as do other perspectives like social identity theory (Tajfel and Turner, 1979)—that people are motivated to support their self (ego) and group interests. According to SJT, this is because, for the disadvantaged, satisfying their inner yearning for predictability (and control) via support for existing arrangements may come at the expense of relinquishing their struggle for equity/equality (i.e., group interests), and these competing demands are likely to cause cognitive dissonance (Festinger, 1957)—a psychological dilemma that people are often motivated to eliminate/avoid. Consistent with SJT, pockets of nationally representative crosssectional surveys (e.g., Jost et al, 2003; Henry and Saul, 2006; Sengupta et al, 2015), and experimental studies (e.g., van der Toorn et al, 2015) have shown that the disadvantaged may support societal systems more strongly than their privileged counterparts do, especially when they are dependent on such systems. Other indirect evidence corroborate the foregoing trends, showing that the disadvantage (e.g., African Americans) are more likely to endorse the conspiratorial belief that the system is rigged against African Americans (Crocker et al, 1999), when a standard reading of SJT would suggest otherwise
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