According to system justification theory, people are motivated to preserve the belief that existing social arrangements are fair, legitimate, and justifiable (Jost & Banaji, 1994). The strongest form of this hypothesis, which draws on the logic of cognitive dissonance theory, holds that people...

According to McGuire and McGuire's (1991) "rationalization postulate," people should adjust their judgments of the desirability of a future event to make them congruent with its perceived likelihood. In a political survey administered to 288 Democrats, Republicans, and nonpartisans immediately...

It has been argued that seemingly benevolent and complementary gender stereotypes serve to maintain or increase support for the system of gender inequality, especially among women. In prior work, support for this hypothesis has been indirectly inferred from the existence of stereotypes...

Public opinion research shows that most people espouse egalitarian ideals and acknowledge substantial income inequality in society, but they consistently perceive the economic system to be highly fair and legitimate. In an attempt to better understand this paradox by considering the cognitive...

System justification theory seeks to understand how and why people provide cognitive and ideological support for the status quo and what the social and psychological consequences of supporting the status quo are, especially for members of disadvantaged groups (e.g., Jost & Banaji, 1994; Jost &...

In an experimental study involving power differences between groups, the effects of legitimate and illegitimate explanations for power were investigated on measures of affect, stereotyping, and memory. We found that powerless groups reported more positive affect (relative to negative affect)...

Organizational theory has addressed the role of metaphor in analyzing organizational culture, fostering innovation in organizational development, and in maintaining control of employees through language and socialization. We argue that metaphors can perform an additional, previously unexamined...

In this chapter, we trace the historical and intellectual origins of system justification theory, summarize the basic assumptions of the theory, and derive 18 specific hypotheses from a system justification perspective. We review and integrate empirical evidence addressing these hypotheses...

In an integration of just world and system justification theories, it was hypothesized that exposure to complementary representations of the poor as happier and more honest than the rich would satisfy the justice motive and lead to an increase in support for the status quo. This hypothesis was...

According to system justification theory, which complement theories of similarity, social identification, and homophily, people internalize and perpetuate systemic forms of inequality, event if it means harboring preference for members of higher status outgroups. In Study 1, students from a high...