Scholars@Duke
Aaron Charles Kay

Aaron Charles Kay

J. Rex Fuqua Distinguished Professor of International Management
Fuqua School of Business

Selected Publications

System justification makes income gaps appear smaller

Journal Article Journal of Experimental Social Psychology · November 1, 2024 People tend to underestimate how much income inequality exists. Much research has attributed this widespread underestimation to differential access to information, variance in exposure to inequality, or motivated attention to different aspects of inequalit ... Full text Cite

Dissociations between animalistic and mechanistic dehumanization in the context of labor exploitation

Journal Article Journal of Experimental Social Psychology · November 1, 2024 Across eight studies (and two additional supplemental studies), we investigate possible bidirectional causal links between dehumanization and exploitation (total N = 5923). Participants were less opposed to the exploitation of mechanistically dehumanized w ... Full text Cite

Megastudy testing 25 treatments to reduce antidemocratic attitudes and partisan animosity.

Journal Article Science (New York, N.Y.) · October 2024 Scholars warn that partisan divisions in the mass public threaten the health of American democracy. We conducted a megastudy (n = 32,059 participants) testing 25 treatments designed by academics and practitioners to reduce Americans' partisan animos ... Full text Cite

When and Why Antiegalitarianism Affects Resistance to Supporting Black-Owned Businesses.

Journal Article Psychological science · August 2024 Understanding how initiatives to support Black-owned businesses are received, and why, has important social and economic implications. To address this, we designed three experiments to investigate the role of antiegalitarian versus egalitarian ideologies a ... Full text Cite

Can selecting the most qualified candidate be unfair? Learning about socioeconomic advantages and disadvantages reduces the perceived fairness of meritocracy and increases support for socioeconomic diversity initiatives in organizations.

Journal Article Journal of experimental psychology. General · February 2024 While the majority of Americans today endorse meritocracy as fair, we suggest that these perceptions can be shaped by whether or not people learn about the presence of socioeconomic advantages and disadvantages in others' lives. Across five studies (N Full text Cite

The consequences of heroization for exploitation.

Journal Article Journal of personality and social psychology · January 2024 The hero label has become a pervasive positive stereotype applied to many different groups and occupations, such as nurses, teachers, and members of the military. Although meant to show support, appreciation, and even admiration, we suggest that attaching ... Full text Cite

The Role of Structure-Seeking in Moral Punishment

Journal Article Social Justice Research · December 1, 2023 Four studies (total N = 1586) test the notion that people are motivated to punish moral rule violators because punishment offers a way to obtain structure and order in the world. First, in a correlational study, increased need for structure was associated ... Full text Cite

Morality's role in the Black Sheep Effect: When and why ingroup members are judged more harshly than outgroup members for the same transgression

Journal Article European Journal of Social Psychology · December 1, 2023 When and why might someone judge an ingroup transgressor more harshly than an outgroup transgressor? Taking a social functionalist perspective, we argue that morality is central to this phenomenon–the Black Sheep Effect–and that it is driven by social cohe ... Full text Cite

Motivated Egalitarianism

Journal Article Current Directions in Psychological Science · August 1, 2023 Much research has examined the link between (anti-)egalitarian ideology and motivated social cognition. However, this research is typically framed around anti-egalitarianism, with the other end of this ideological pole, egalitarianism, often ignored altoge ... Full text Cite

Heroization and ironic funneling effects.

Journal Article Journal of personality and social psychology · July 2023 In recent years, much of the American public has venerated military veterans as heroes. Despite overwhelmingly positive public attitudes toward veterans, veterans have experienced higher rates of unemployment and underemployment than their nonveteran peers ... Full text Cite

The Psychology of Left-Right Political Polarization; and an Experimental Intervention for Curbing Partisan Animosity and Support for Antidemocratic Violence

Journal Article Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science · July 1, 2023 Healthy democratic polities feature competing visions of a good society. They also require tolerance, trust, and cooperation to avoid toxic polarization that puts democracy itself at risk. In the U.S., liberal-leftists and conservative-rightists differ in ... Full text Cite

The mutual constitution of culture and psyche: The bidirectional relationship between individuals' perceived control and cultural tightness-looseness.

Journal Article Journal of personality and social psychology · May 2023 According to the theory of mutual constitution of culture and psyche, just as culture shapes people, individuals' psychological states can influence culture. We build on compensatory control theory, which suggests that low personal control can lead people ... Full text Cite

Who needs control? A cultural perspective on the process of compensatory control

Journal Article Social and Personality Psychology Compass · February 1, 2023 Compensatory control theory (CCT) provides a framework for understanding the mechanisms at play when one's personal control is challenged. The model suggests that believing the world is a structured and predictable place is fundamental, insofar as it provi ... Full text Cite

Does "Jamal" receive a harsher sentence than "James"? First-name bias in the criminal sentencing of Black men.

Journal Article Law and human behavior · February 2023 ObjectiveUsing archival and experimental methods, we tested the role that racial associations of first names play in criminal sentencing.HypothesesWe hypothesized that Black defendants with more stereotypically Black names (e.g., Jamal) w ... Full text Cite

Communal expectations conflict with autonomy motives: The western drive for autonomy shapes women's negative responses to positive gender stereotypes.

Journal Article Journal of personality and social psychology · January 2023 Western culture idealizes an autonomous self-a self that strives for independence and freedom from the influence and control of others. We explored how the value placed on autonomy in Western culture intersects with the normative trait expectations experie ... Full text Cite

Belief in divine moral authority satisfies the psychological need for structure and increases in the face of perceived injustice

Journal Article Journal of Experimental Social Psychology · July 1, 2022 Across eight studies, we investigated why so many people across different cultures and religious traditions ground morality and God, and why beliefs in God as a supreme moral authority increase in response to perceived injustices in the world. We found con ... Full text Cite

The partisan trade-off bias: When political polarization meets policy trade-offs

Journal Article Journal of Experimental Social Psychology · January 1, 2022 Liberals and conservatives currently struggle to reach political agreement on policy proposals. While political polarization is closely associated with this phenomenon, the precise psychological mechanisms via which polarization works to affect political c ... Full text Cite

The Challenges of Military Veterans in Their Transition to the Workplace: A Call for Integrating Basic and Applied Psychological Science.

Journal Article Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · May 2021 Long-standing structural features of the military have created a culture and society that is dramatically different and disconnected from civilian society. Thus, veterans transitioning to civilian society face a number of challenges related to fulfilling b ... Full text Cite

A Privileged Point of View: Effects of Subjective Socioeconomic Status on Naïve Realism and Political Division.

Journal Article Personality & social psychology bulletin · February 2021 In the United States, both economic inequality and political conflict are on the rise. We investigated whether subjective socioeconomic status (SSS) may help explain why these dual patterns emerge. We hypothesized that higher SSS may increase naïve realism ... Full text Cite

Scientific skepticism and inequality: Political and ideological roots

Journal Article Journal of Experimental Social Psychology · November 1, 2020 Despite the recent influx of studies suggesting the negative societal impact of inequality, many remain skeptical of these scientific findings. Across four studies, we explore how political affiliation and social dominance orientation (SDO) interactively s ... Full text Cite

Structure-seeking as a psychological antecedent of beliefs about morality.

Journal Article Journal of experimental psychology. General · October 2020 People differ in their beliefs about the objectivity of moral claims. We investigated a possible psychological antecedent that might be associated with people's beliefs about the objectivity of moral claims. More specifically, we examined the relationship ... Full text Cite

Political ideology and compensatory control mechanisms

Journal Article Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences · August 1, 2020 People strive to feel in control. As such, under control threat, people defensively endorse ideologies that help compensate for diminished control. Although scholarly work has tended to focus on conservatism as a compensatory control mechanism, recent rese ... Full text Cite

The Psychological Appeal of Fake-News Attributions.

Journal Article Psychological science · July 2020 The term fake news is increasingly used to discredit information from reputable news organizations. We tested the possibility that fake-news claims are appealing because they satisfy the need to see the world as structured. Believing that news organ ... Full text Cite

Understanding contemporary forms of exploitation: Attributions of passion serve to legitimize the poor treatment of workers.

Journal Article Journal of personality and social psychology · January 2020 The pursuit of passion in one's work is touted in contemporary discourse. Although passion may indeed be beneficial in many ways, we suggest that the modern cultural emphasis may also serve to facilitate the legitimization of unfair and demeaning managemen ... Full text Cite

Fake news attributions as a source of nonspecific structure

Chapter · January 1, 2020 Although “fake news” often refers to forms of political disinformation, the term is also used as a means of discrediting stories from more credible sources. Specifically, “fake news” depicts the media as being intentionally deceptive, as opposed to merely ... Full text Cite

Politics and religion: commutable, conflicting, and collaborative systems for satisfying the need for order

Chapter · January 1, 2020 In this chapter, we outline a program of research that has sought to understand how sociopolitical and religious systems overlap in their satiation of psychological needs and suggest that this overlap helps one explain a range of sociocultural phenomenon r ... Full text Cite

Psychological reactance as a function of thought versus behavioral control

Journal Article Journal of Experimental Social Psychology · September 1, 2019 How can people persuade and influence others? One option is to directly target others' behavior through rules and incentives. Another increasingly popular option, however, is to focus on modifying what others think rather than how they behave, and hoping b ... Full text Cite

A control-based account of stereotyping

Journal Article Journal of Experimental Social Psychology · September 1, 2019 Drawing from compensatory control theory, we propose that because stereotypes provide psychological assurance that the world is orderly and predictable, stereotyping should increase among those lacking control. Four studies support this control-based accou ... Full text Cite

Military veterans are morally typecast as agentic but unfeeling: Implications for veteran employment

Journal Article Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes · July 1, 2019 What kind of “mind” do people assume those in the military have? This question has important implications for military veterans and provides an opportunity to test moral typecasting as a critical element of the theory of dyadic morality (TDM: Gray & Wegner ... Full text Cite

‘Jesus, take the wheel’: the appeal of spiritual products in satiating concerns about randomness

Journal Article Journal of Marketing Management · March 24, 2019 Why are consumers drawn to spiritual products? Leveraging theorising regarding the psychological need to perceive the world as orderly and non-random, we posit that products imbued with religious/spiritual significance help manage concerns about randomness ... Full text Cite

Lean in messages increase attributions of women's responsibility for gender inequality.

Journal Article Journal of personality and social psychology · December 2018 Although women's underrepresentation in senior-level positions in the workplace has multiple causes, women's self-improvement or "empowerment" at work has recently attracted cultural attention as a solution. For example, the bestselling book Lean In ... Full text Cite

Structure and Goal Pursuit: Individual and Cultural Differences

Journal Article Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science · December 1, 2018 Full text Cite

“If hierarchical, then corrupt”: Exploring people's tendency to associate hierarchy with corruption in organizations

Journal Article Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes · November 1, 2018 We propose that people associate organizational hierarchy with corruption. Nine studies (N = 1896) provide triangulating evidence for this tendency and its underlying mechanism. We find that people expect more corruption to manifest among the employees of ... Full text Cite

Compensatory control and religious beliefs: a registered replication report across two countries

Journal Article Comprehensive Results in Social Psychology · September 2, 2018 Compensatory Control Theory (CCT) suggests that religious belief systems provide an external source of control that can substitute a perceived lack of personal control. In a seminal paper, it was experimentally demonstrated that a threat to personal contro ... Full text Cite

System justification: Experimental evidence, its contextual nature, and implications for social change.

Journal Article The British journal of social psychology · September 2018 We review conceptual and empirical contributions to system justification theory over the last fifteen years, emphasizing the importance of an experimental approach and consideration of context. First, we review the indirect evidence of the system justifica ... Full text Cite

How perceptions of one's organization can affect perceptions of the self: Membership in a stable organization can sustain individuals' sense of control

Journal Article Journal of Experimental Social Psychology · May 1, 2018 Building on contemporary perspectives regarding the role that group identification can play in sustaining control motives, we propose that being a member of a stable organization—one experienced as predictable and consistent rather than changing and in flu ... Full text Cite

When and why does belief in a controlling God strengthen goal commitment?

Journal Article Journal of Experimental Social Psychology · March 1, 2018 The perception that God controls one's life can bolster motivation to pursue personal goals, but it can also have no impact and even squelch motivation. To better understand how religious beliefs impact self-regulation, the current research built on Compen ... Full text Cite

Fate as a motivated (and de-motivating) belief: Evidence for a link from task importance to belief in fate to effort

Journal Article Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes · January 1, 2018 The perception of whether one has personal control over a specific task or goal has been shown to be a crucial predictor of effort and persistence. Given this, one might expect people to perceive high personal control over tasks that are very important. Ho ... Full text Cite

Guns as a source of order and chaos: Compensatory control and the psychological (dis)utility of guns for liberals and conservatives

Journal Article Journal of the Association for Consumer Research · January 1, 2018 Firearms are one the most contentious consumer products in the United States, with opinions on guns being strongly divided along liberal versus conservative lines. The current research leverages compensatory control theory (CCT; Kay et al. 2008) to show ho ... Full text Cite

Effective to a fault: Organizational structure predicts attitudes toward minority organizations

Journal Article Journal of Experimental Social Psychology · November 1, 2017 We consider how the structure of groups seeking collective action on behalf of minorities impacts attitudes toward them. We predicted that hierarchical minority organizations are perceived as more effective social agents than non-hierarchical minority orga ... Full text Cite

“One Nation Under God”: The System-Justifying Function of Symbolically Aligning God and Government

Journal Article Political Psychology · October 1, 2017 Do references to God in political discourse increase confidence in the U.S. sociopolitical system? Using a system justification framework (Jost & Banaji,), five studies provide evidence that, (1) increasingly governments symbolically associate the nation w ... Full text Cite

Thought-control difficulty motivates structure seeking.

Journal Article Journal of experimental psychology. General · August 2017 Struggling to control one's mind can change how the world appears. In prior studies testing the compensatory control theory, reduced control over the external environment motivated the search for perceptual patterns and other forms of structured knowledge, ... Full text Cite

Compensatory control and ambiguity intolerance

Journal Article Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes · May 1, 2017 When do people find ambiguity intolerable, and how might this manifest in the workplace where roles, guidelines and expectations can be made to be more or less ambiguous? Compensatory Control Theory (CCT; Kay, Gaucher, Napier, Callan, & Laurin, 2008) sugge ... Full text Cite

The Motivational Underpinnings of Belief in God

Journal Article · January 1, 2017 Beliefs in powerful Gods are prevalent across time and across societies. In this chapter, we explore the motivated underpinnings of this phenomenon. After describing two popular theories that help account for some of this prevalence—one focused on byproduc ... Full text Cite

An affect misattribution pathway to perceptions of Intrinsic reward

Journal Article Social Cognition · January 1, 2017 Intrinsic rewards are typically thought to stem from an activity's inherent properties and not from separable rewards one receives from it. Yet, people may not consciously notice or remember all the subtle external rewards that correspond with an activity ... Full text Cite

Interventionist external agents make specific advice less demotivating

Journal Article Journal of Experimental Social Psychology · January 1, 2017 Across four experiments, we explored how reminders of powerful external agents—interventionist Gods and reliable corporate institutions—influence people's motivation in the realm of financial goals. We found evidence that when people receive specific finan ... Full text Cite

Ideology and intergroup inequality: emerging directions and trends

Journal Article Current Opinion in Psychology · October 1, 2016 The authors propose that two guiding frameworks characterize psychological research on the relation between ideology and inequality. The first, called the product approach, focuses on ideologies directly concerned with intergroup relations, in which belief ... Full text Cite

On incidental catalysts of elaboration: Reminders of environmental structure promote effortful thought

Journal Article Journal of Experimental Social Psychology · May 1, 2016 Life is filled with situations in which cognitive elaboration can powerfully sway outcomes, and yet our understanding of the contextual factors that impact elaboration are greatly limited to those entwined with the focal evaluation, judgment, or decision. ... Full text Cite

A Gender Bias in the Attribution of Creativity: Archival and Experimental Evidence for the Perceived Association Between Masculinity and Creative Thinking.

Journal Article Psychological science · November 2015 We propose that the propensity to think creatively tends to be associated with independence and self-direction-qualities generally ascribed to men-so that men are often perceived to be more creative than women. In two experiments, we found that "outside th ... Full text Cite

Motivated employee blindness: The impact of labor market instability on judgment of organizational inefficiencies

Journal Article Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes · July 14, 2015 While employees might be expected to be especially vigilant to problems within their organization during times of economic instability, we build on motivational perspectives put forth by System Justification Theory to propose the opposite effect, namely th ... Full text Cite

Positive Stereotypes Are Pervasive and Powerful.

Journal Article Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · July 2015 Stereotypes and their associated category-based processes have traditionally been considered largely within the context of the negativity of their content and consequences, both among the general public and the scientific community. This review summarizes ... Full text Cite

Randomness increases self-reported anxiety and neurophysiological correlates of performance monitoring.

Journal Article Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · May 2015 Several prominent theories spanning clinical, social and developmental psychology suggest that people are motivated to see the world as a sensible orderly place. These theories presuppose that randomness is aversive because it is associated with unpredicta ... Full text Cite

Compensatory control and the appeal of a structured world.

Journal Article Psychological bulletin · May 2015 People are motivated to perceive themselves as having control over their lives. Consequently, they respond to events and cognitions that reduce control with compensatory strategies for restoring perceived control to baseline levels. Prior theory and resear ... Full text Cite

The psychological advantage of unfalsifiability: the appeal of untestable religious and political ideologies.

Journal Article Journal of personality and social psychology · March 2015 We propose that people may gain certain "offensive" and "defensive" advantages for their cherished belief systems (e.g., religious and political views) by including aspects of unfalsifiability in those belief systems, such that some aspects of the beliefs ... Full text Cite

A sense of powerlessness fosters system justification: Implications for the legitimation of authority, hierarchy, and government

Journal Article Political Psychology · February 1, 2015 In an attempt to explain the stability of hierarchy, we focus on the perspective of the powerless and how a subjective sense of dependence leads them to imbue the system and its authorities with legitimacy. In Study 1, we found in a nationally representati ... Full text Cite

The emotional roots of conspiratorial perceptions, system justification, and belief in the paranormal

Journal Article Journal of Experimental Social Psychology · January 1, 2015 We predicted that experiencing emotions that reflect uncertainty about the world (e.g., worry, surprise, fear, hope), compared to certain emotions (e.g., anger, happiness, disgust, contentment), would activate the need to imbue the world with order and str ... Full text Cite

Subjective status shapes political preferences.

Journal Article Psychological science · January 2015 Economic inequality in America is at historically high levels. Although most Americans indicate that they would prefer greater equality, redistributive policies aimed at reducing inequality are frequently unpopular. Traditional accounts posit that attitude ... Full text Cite

The justice motive as a driver of religious experience

Journal Article Religion, Brain and Behavior · January 1, 2015 Full text Cite

ACHIEVING EXISTENTIAL SECURITY THROUGH SYMBOLICALLY FUSING SECULAR AND RELIGIOUS SOURCES OF CONTROL AND ORDER

Chapter · January 1, 2015 The sociopolitical effects of modernization and the sophisticated technological innovations of the consumer-driven marketplace have been credited with enhancing the average person’s security and control across many domains of their lives. These aspects of ... Full text Cite

Solution Aversion: On the Relation Between Ideology and Motivated Disbelief

Journal Article Journal of Personality and Social Psychology · November 6, 2014 There is often a curious distinction between what the scientific community and the general population believe to be true of dire scientific issues, and this skepticism tends to vary markedly across groups. For instance, in the case of climate change, Repub ... Full text Open Access Cite

Making sense of misfortune: deservingness, self-esteem, and patterns of self-defeat.

Journal Article Journal of personality and social psychology · July 2014 Drawing on theorizing and research suggesting that people are motivated to view their world as an orderly and predictable place in which people get what they deserve, the authors proposed that (a) random and uncontrollable bad outcomes will lower self-este ... Full text Cite

Seeking structure in social organization: compensatory control and the psychological advantages of hierarchy.

Journal Article Journal of personality and social psychology · April 2014 Hierarchies are a ubiquitous form of human social organization. We hypothesized that 1 reason for the prevalence of hierarchies is that they offer structure and therefore satisfy the core motivational needs for order and control relative to less structured ... Full text Cite

A functional basis for structure-seeking: exposure to structure promotes willingness to engage in motivated action.

Journal Article Journal of experimental psychology. General · April 2014 A recurring observation of experimental psychologists is that people prefer, seek out, and even selectively "see" structure in their social and natural environments. Structure-seeking has been observed across a wide range of phenomena--from the detection o ... Full text Cite

Theoretical integration in motivational science: System justification as one of many "autonomous motivational structures".

Journal Article The Behavioral and brain sciences · April 2014 Recognizing that there is a multiplicity of motives - and that the accessibility and strength of each one varies chronically and temporarily - is essential if motivational scientists are to achieve genuine theoretical and empirical integration. We agree th ... Full text Cite

When government confidence undermines public involvement in modern disasters

Journal Article Social Cognition · January 1, 2014 As our global community increases in complexity, crises and disasters-such as global financial meltdowns and natural disasters-increasingly have the ability to impact millions of lives. Because of the scale and complexity of these issues, they are seemingl ... Full text Cite

Anti-feminist backlash: The role of system justification in the rejection of feminism

Journal Article Group Processes & Intergroup Relations · January 1, 2014 System justification theory (SJT) posits that people are motivated to believe that the social system they live in is fair, desirable, and how it should be, especially in contexts that heighten the system justification motive. Past researchers have suggeste ... Full text Cite

System justification in organizational contexts: How a Motivated preference for the status quo can affect organizational attitudes and behaviors

Journal Article Research in Organizational Behavior · January 1, 2014 In this chapter, we put forth the premise that people's motivated tendency to justify and defend their external systems has important, and largely unexplored, implications for the field of organizational behavior. Drawing on recent theoretical and empirica ... Full text Cite

Agency and Control

Chapter · 2014 Cite

Reactance of Rationalization? Predicting Public Responses to Government Policy

Journal Article Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences · 2014 Cite

Differences in punitiveness across three cultures: A test of American exceptionalism in justice attitudes

Journal Article Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology · December 12, 2013 The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world and a more punitive approach to criminal justice issues than comparable Western democracies. One potential explanation for this distinctiveness is that Americans, as individuals, are uniquel ... Cite

Response to restrictive policies: Reconciling system justification and psychological reactance

Journal Article Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes · November 1, 2013 Here we propose a dual process model to reconcile two contradictory predictions about how people respond to restrictive policies imposed upon them by organizations and systems within which they operate. When participants' attention was not drawn to the res ... Full text Cite

Compensatory Control and Its Implications for Ideological Extremism

Journal Article Journal of Social Issues · September 1, 2013 This article outlines and reviews evidence for a model of compensatory control designed to account for the motivated belief in personal and external sources of control. In doing so, we attempt to shed light on the content and strength of ideologies, includ ... Full text Cite

A test of the flexible ideology hypothesis: System justification motives interact with ideological cueing to predict political judgments

Journal Article Journal of Experimental Social Psychology · July 1, 2013 We hypothesize that the system justification motive increases individuals' susceptibility to ideological priming effects. We tested this hypothesis in a sample of 308 participants in which system justification, accessibility of meritocratic or egalitarian ... Full text Cite

Stability and the justification of social inequality

Journal Article European Journal of Social Psychology · June 1, 2013 Modern society is rife with inequality. People's interpretations of these inequalities, however, vary considerably: Different people can interpret, for example, the existing gender gap in wages as being the result of systemic discrimination, or as being th ... Full text Cite

The insidious (and ironic) effects of positive stereotypes

Journal Article Journal of Experimental Social Psychology · March 1, 2013 The present research demonstrates that positive stereotypes - though often treated as harmless, flattering and innocuous - may represent an especially insidious means of promoting antiquated beliefs about social groups. Specifically, across four studies (a ... Full text Cite

Toward a comprehensive understanding of existential threat: Insights from paul tillich

Journal Article Social Cognition · December 1, 2012 Experimental existential psychology (XXP) empirically investigates how people's motives for meaning and personal value influence their lives, and how symbolic self-awareness undergirds these motives and experienced threats to their fulfillment. The authors ... Full text Cite

Collectivism and the meaning of suffering.

Journal Article Journal of personality and social psychology · December 2012 People need to understand why an instance of suffering occurred and what purpose it might have. One widespread account of suffering is a repressive suffering construal (RSC): interpreting suffering as occurring because people deviate from social norms and ... Full text Cite

Outsourcing punishment to God: beliefs in divine control reduce earthly punishment.

Journal Article Proceedings. Biological sciences · August 2012 The sanctioning of norm-transgressors is a necessary--though often costly--task for maintaining a well-functioning society. Prior to effective and reliable secular institutions for punishment, large-scale societies depended on individuals engaging in 'altr ... Full text Cite

Reactance versus rationalization: divergent responses to policies that constrain freedom.

Journal Article Psychological science · February 2012 How do people respond to government policies and work environments that place restrictions on their personal freedoms? The psychological literature offers two contradictory answers to this question. Here, we attempt to resolve this apparent discrepancy. Sp ... Full text Cite

On the perpetuation of ignorance: system dependence, system justification, and the motivated avoidance of sociopolitical information.

Journal Article Journal of personality and social psychology · February 2012 How do people cope when they feel uninformed or unable to understand important social issues, such as the environment, energy concerns, or the economy? Do they seek out information, or do they simply ignore the threatening issue at hand? One would intuitiv ... Full text Cite

Ideological Processes

Chapter · 2012 Cite

Divergent effects of activating thoughts of God on self-regulation.

Journal Article Journal of personality and social psychology · January 2012 Despite the cultural ubiquity of ideas and images related to God, relatively little is known about the effects of exposure to God representations on behavior. Specific depictions of God differ across religions, but common to most is that God is (a) an omni ... Full text Cite

On social stability and social change: Understanding when system justification does and does not occur

Journal Article Current Directions in Psychological Science · December 1, 2011 More than a decade of research from the perspective of system-justification theory (Jost & Banaji, 1994) has demonstrated that people engage in motivated psychological processes that bolster and support the status quo. We propose that this motive is highly ... Full text Cite

Evidence for the specificity of control motivations in worldview defense: Distinguishing compensatory control from uncertainty management and terror management processes

Journal Article Journal of Experimental Social Psychology · September 1, 2011 Research inspired by the compensatory control model (CCM) shows that people compensate for personal control threats by bolstering aspects of the cultural worldview that afford external control. According to the CCM these effects stem from the motivation to ... Full text Cite

System justification and the defense of committed relationship ideology.

Journal Article Journal of personality and social psychology · August 2011 A consequential ideology in Western society is the uncontested belief that a committed relationship is the most important adult relationship and that almost all people want to marry or seriously couple (DePaulo & Morris, 2005). In the present article, we i ... Full text Cite

Self-stereotyping as a route to system justification

Journal Article Social Cognition · July 11, 2011 Endorsing complementary stereotypes about others (i.e., stereotypes consisting of a balance of positive and negative characteristics) can function to satisfy the need to perceive one's social system as fair and balanced. To what extent might this also appl ... Full text Cite

Evidence that gendered wording in job advertisements exists and sustains gender inequality.

Journal Article Journal of personality and social psychology · July 2011 Social dominance theory (Sidanius & Pratto, 1999) contends that institutional-level mechanisms exist that reinforce and perpetuate existing group-based inequalities, but very few such mechanisms have been empirically demonstrated. We propose that gendered ... Full text Cite

Culture modifies the operation of prime-to-behavior effects

Journal Article Journal of Experimental Social Psychology · July 1, 2011 Culture affects the extent to which people focus on other people or on the situation in drawing inferences. Building on recent research showing that perceptions of others and situations can mediate prime-to-behavior effects, we tested whether culture would ... Full text Cite

When your world must be defended: Choosing products to justify the system

Journal Article Journal of Consumer Research · June 1, 2011 Consumers are often strongly motivated to view themselves as part of a legitimate and fair external system. Our research focuses on how individuals adopt distinct ways of defending their system when it is threatened and, in particular, how this is revealed ... Full text Cite

A person by situation account of motivated system defense

Journal Article Social Psychological and Personality Science · March 1, 2011 Three studies demonstrate how individual differences in confidence in the sociopolitical system interact with threats that engage the system justification motive to produce system defense. Following threat, participants low, but not high, in system confide ... Full text Cite

Preface

Chapter · January 1, 2011 Full text Cite

The psychology of justice and legitimacy: The Ontario symposium

Book · January 1, 2011 In response to the international turmoil, violence, and increasing ideological polarization, social psychological interest in the topics of legitimacy and social justice has blossomed considerably. Social psychologists have explored the psychological under ... Full text Cite

The psychology of justice and legitimacy: The Ontario symposium

Journal Article The Psychology of Justice and Legitimacy · 2011 © 2010 by Taylor and Francis Group, LLC.In response to the international turmoil, violence, and increasing ideological polarization, social psychological interest in the topics of legitimacy and social justice has blossomed considerably. Social psychologis ... Full text Cite

Social disadvantage and the self-regulatory function of justice beliefs.

Journal Article Journal of personality and social psychology · January 2011 Five studies support the hypothesis that beliefs in societal fairness offer a self-regulatory benefit for members of socially disadvantaged groups. Specifically, members of disadvantaged groups are more likely than members of advantaged groups to calibrate ... Full text Cite

In search of the silver lining: the justice motive fosters perceptions of benefits in the later lives of tragedy victims.

Journal Article Psychological science · November 2010 Past research has demonstrated that people's need to perceive the world as fair and just leads them to blame and derogate victims of tragedy. The research reported here shows that a positive reaction--bestowing additional meaning on the lives of individual ... Full text Cite

For God (or) country: the hydraulic relation between government instability and belief in religious sources of control.

Journal Article Journal of personality and social psychology · November 2010 It has been recently proposed that people can flexibly rely on sources of control that are both internal and external to the self to satisfy the need to believe that their world is under control (i.e., that events do not unfold randomly or haphazardly). Co ... Full text Cite

Restricted emigration, system inescapability, and defense of the status quo: system-justifying consequences of restricted exit opportunities.

Journal Article Psychological science · August 2010 The freedom to emigrate at will from a geographic location is an internationally recognized human right. However, this right is systematically violated by restrictive migration policies. In three experiments, we explored the psychological consequences of v ... Full text Cite

The effects of priming legal concepts on perceived trust and competitiveness, self-interested attitudes, and competitive behavior

Journal Article Journal of Experimental Social Psychology · March 1, 2010 Socio-legal scholars have suggested that, as a ubiquitous social system, law shapes social reality and provides interpretive frameworks for social relations. Across five studies, we tested the idea that the law shapes social reality by fostering the assump ... Full text Cite

Religious belief as compensatory control.

Journal Article Personality and social psychology review : an official journal of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc · February 2010 The authors review experimental evidence that religious conviction can be a defensive source of compensatory control when personal or external sources of control are low. They show evidence that (a) belief in religious deities and secular institutions can ... Full text Cite

Randomness, attributions of arousal, and belief in god.

Journal Article Psychological science · February 2010 Full text Cite

Ideology and power

Chapter · 2010 Cite

Chapter Five: Indirect prime-to-behavior effects: The role of perceptions of the self, others, and situations in connecting primed constructs to social behavior

Journal Article Advances in Experimental Social Psychology · January 1, 2010 For more than a decade, researchers have convincingly shown that people's social behavior can be affected by primed constructs without people having any awareness of their influence. Earlier research proposed direct priming accounts for these effects, sugg ... Full text Cite

Compensatory rationalizations and the resolution of everyday undeserved outcomes.

Journal Article Personality & social psychology bulletin · January 2010 People prefer to perceive the world as just; however, the everyday experience of undeserved events challenges this perception.The authors suggest that one way people rationalize these daily experiences of unfairness is by means of a compensatory bias. Peop ... Full text Cite

Compensatory control: Achieving order through the mind, our institutions, and the heavens

Journal Article Current Directions in Psychological Science · December 1, 2009 We propose that people protect the belief in a controlled, nonrandom world by imbuing their social, physical, and metaphysical environments with order and structure when their sense of personal control is threatened. We demonstrate that when personal contr ... Full text Cite

Inequality, discrimination, and the power of the status quo: Direct evidence for a motivation to see the way things are as the way they should be.

Journal Article Journal of personality and social psychology · September 2009 How powerful is the status quo in determining people's social ideals? The authors propose (a) that people engage in injunctification, that is, a motivated tendency to construe the current status quo as the most desirable and reasonable state of affairs (i. ... Full text Cite

Political mindset: Effects of schema priming on liberal-conservative political positions

Journal Article Journal of Experimental Social Psychology · July 1, 2009 Although stable factors play an important role in determining people's political positions, most Americans also hold a mix of values and beliefs some congruent with political conservatism and some congruent with political liberalism. To investigate this mo ... Full text Cite

The effects of justice motivation on memory for self- and other-relevant events

Journal Article Journal of Experimental Social Psychology · July 1, 2009 We examined whether people might distort and selectively remember the past in ways that enable them to sustain a belief in a just world (BJW; Lerner, M. J. (1980). The belief in a just world: A fundamental delusion. New York: Plenum Press). In Study 1, rec ... Full text Cite

On the Social and Psychological Bases of Ideology and System Justification

Book · May 1, 2009 This chapter summarizes research that both reflects and exemplifies the recent resurgence of interest in the social and psychological characteristics and processes that give rise to ideological forms. Ideology is an elusive, multifaceted construct that can ... Full text Cite

A Contextual Analysis of the System Justification Motive and Its Societal Consequences

Journal Article · May 1, 2009 This chapter reviews recent theory and empirical evidence demonstrating the effects of the system justification motive on consequential social and psychological phenomena, as well as the conditions under which these effects are likely to be most pronounced ... Full text Cite

Social and Psychological Bases of Ideology and System Justification

Journal Article Social and Psychological Bases of Ideology and System Justification · May 1, 2009 This volume both reflects and exemplifies the recent resurgence of interest in the social and psychological characteristics and processes that give rise to ideological forms. Ideology is an elusive, multifaceted construct that can usefully be analyzed in t ... Full text Cite

Left-right ideological differences in system Justification following exposure to complementary versus noncomplementary stereotype exemplars

Journal Article European Journal of Social Psychology · March 1, 2009 The capacity for victim-derogating stereotypes and attributions to justify social inequality and maintain the status quo is well known among social scientists and other observers. Research conducted from the perspective of system justification theory sugge ... Full text Cite

The role of interpersonal perceptions in the prime-to-behavior pathway.

Journal Article Journal of personality and social psychology · February 2009 The present research suggests that biased interpersonal perceptions can mediate prime-to-behavior effects and introduces a new moderator for when such mediation will occur. Across 5 experiments, the authors provide evidence that priming effects on behavior ... Full text Cite

On the belief in God: Towards an understanding of the emotional substrates of compensatory control

Journal Article Journal of Experimental Social Psychology · November 1, 2008 We suggest that beliefs in a controlling God originate, at least in part, from the desire to avoid the emotionally uncomfortable experience of perceiving the world as random and chaotic. Forty-seven participants engaged in an anxiety-provoking visualizatio ... Full text Cite

God and the government: testing a compensatory control mechanism for the support of external systems.

Journal Article Journal of personality and social psychology · July 2008 The authors propose that the high levels of support often observed for governmental and religious systems can be explained, in part, as a means of coping with the threat posed by chronically or situationally fluctuating levels of perceived personal control ... Full text Cite

The situated person: Effects of construct accessibility on situation construals and interpersonal perception

Journal Article Journal of Experimental Social Psychology · March 1, 2008 Three studies examined the interrelationship between primed constructs, situation construal, and person perception. Previous research on priming and person perception has generally neglected the situational context. We predicted that when rich situational ... Full text Cite

Panglossian Ideology In The Service Of System Justification: How Complementary Stereotypes Help Us To Rationalize Inequality

Journal Article Advances in Experimental Social Psychology · April 26, 2007 According to system justification theory, there is a general social psychological tendency to rationalize the status quo, that is, to see it as good, fair, legitimate, and desirable. This tendency is reminiscent of the dispositional outlook of Voltaire's f ... Full text Cite

Victim derogation and victim enhancement as alternate routes to system justification.

Journal Article Psychological science · March 2005 Abstract-Numerous studies have documented the potential for victim-blaming attributions to justify the status quo. Recent work suggests that complementary, victim-enhancing stereotypes may also increase support for existing social arrangements. We seek to ... Full text Cite

Exposure to benevolent sexism and complementary gender stereotypes: consequences for specific and diffuse forms of system justification.

Journal Article Journal of personality and social psychology · March 2005 Many have suggested that complementary gender stereotypes of men as agentic (but not communal) and women as communal (but not agentic) serve to increase system justification, but direct experimental support has been lacking. The authors exposed people to s ... Full text Cite

Material priming: The influence of mundane physical objects on situational construal and competitive behavioral choice

Journal Article Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes · September 1, 2004 Inspired by potential theoretical linkages between nonconscious priming work in psychology and the anthropological emphasis on the impact of material culture, five studies were conducted to investigate the role of implicitly presented material objects and ... Full text Cite

Language and interpersonal cognition: causal effects of variations in pronoun usage on perceptions of closeness.

Journal Article Personality & social psychology bulletin · May 2004 Four studies examined the hypothesis that subtle language variations can have a causal impact on perceptions of relationships. In interpersonal interactions, language can function implicitly to reflect, perpetuate, and communicate relationship perceptions. ... Full text Cite

Complementary justice: effects of "poor but happy" and "poor but honest" stereotype exemplars on system justification and implicit activation of the justice motive.

Journal Article Journal of personality and social psychology · November 2003 It was hypothesized that exposure to complementary representations of the poor as happier and more honest than the rich would lead to increased support for the status quo. In Study 1, exposure to "poor but happy" and "rich but miserable" stereotype exempla ... Full text Cite

Adult attachment and the inhibition of rejection

Journal Article Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology · June 1, 2003 Recent research has identified the inhibition of negative interpersonal information as a critical social cognitive mechanism associated with adult attachment orientations. Sixty undergraduate participants were conditioned to associate one computer tone wit ... Full text Cite

Positive feelings in friendship: Does imbalance in the relationship matter?

Journal Article Journal of Social and Personal Relationships · February 1, 2003 We examined predictors of positive feelings in friendship. Pairs of same-sex (female - female) and cross-sex (female - male) friends completed questionnaires about each other. Positive feelings covaried directly with friendship level (e.g., best versus goo ... Full text Cite

The perceptual push: The interplay of implicit cues and explicit situational construals on behavioral intentions in the prisoner's dilemma

Journal Article Journal of Experimental Social Psychology · January 1, 2003 Although it is clear that nonconscious primes can affect behavioral decisions, the extent to which the prime-to-behavior link is mediated by intervening interpretative processes is still unknown. The present research examined the mediational role of "situa ... Full text Cite

Sour grapes, sweet lemons, and the anticipatory rationalization of the status quo

Journal Article Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin · January 1, 2002 Integrating theories of cognitive dissonance, system justification, and dynamic thought systems, the authors hypothesized that people would engage in anticipatory rationalization of sociopolitical outcomes for which they were not responsible. In two studie ... Full text Cite