Complementary Justice: Effects of "Poor but Happy" and "Poor but Honest" Stereotype Exemplars on System Justification and Implicit Activation of the Justice Motive.

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246

Individuals who violate expectations increase uncertainty during social interactions. Three experiments explored whether expectancy-violating partners engender "threat" responses in perceivers. Participants interacted with confederates who violated or confirmed expectations while multiple measures were assessed, including cardiovascular reactivity, task performance, appraisals, and behavior. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants interacted with White or Latino confederates who described their family backgrounds as either high or low socioeconomic status. In Experiment 3, participants interacted with Asian or White confederates who spoke with expected accents or southern accents. Participants interacting with expectancy-violating partners (e.g., Asians with southern accents) exhibited cardiovascular responses consistent with threat, poorer task performance, and manifested negative and defeat-related behavior. Implications for decreasing prejudicial responses via uncertainty reduction are discussed.Keywords: uncertainty, expectancy violations, cardiovascular reactivity, challenge and threat Interacting with strangers can be stressful. During such interactions, individuals are simultaneously attending to their own thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, including self-presentational, self-regulatory, and impression management concerns, as well as trying to accurately perceive the characteristics of the person to establish conversational fluency, expectations, and social norms (DePaulo & Friedman, 1998;Gilbert, 1998;Gudykunst, 1984). To the extent that the stranger meets expectations, the interaction is likely to be routinized and predictable. However, when the stranger is unexpected or surprising in some way, routinized responses are likely to be disrupted and anxiety heightened (Hebl, Tickle, & Heatherton, 2000). In the present study, we tested the notion that expectancy violations engendered by interaction partners would create more situational uncertainty and increase psychological threat as marked cardiovascularly, affectively, and behaviorally.We have previously observed that, in general, African Americans relative to European Americans engendered threat responses among White participants during a pleasant social interaction. More important, the degree of past intergroup contact with African Americans reported by White participants moderated responses, such that the greater the contact with African Americans the lower the threat responses. This finding underscores the importance of contact during social interactions. But what about situations in which one could not have experienced contact because the stranger is surprising or unexpected in some way, that is, a stranger who violates expectancies?Expectancies function to help people predict the future on the basis of past experiences and knowledge (Olson, Roese, & Zanna, 1996). Hence, expectancy violations disrupt one's predictive ability and can create uncertainty. This uncertainty is likely to increase the demands of situations, diverting attentional resources away...

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 95%

Threatened by the unexpected: Physiological responses during social interactions with expectancy-violating partners.

Mendes

Blascovich

Hunter

et al. 2007

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298

246

“…To the extent that hierarchies are commonly the way in which systems are organized, defending the status quo often entails defending hierarchies (Gaucher, Kay, & Laurin, 2010;Kaiser et al, 2013). For example, system justification research demonstrates that even disadvantaged individuals who live in socially-stratified systems will bolster and defend a variety of hierarchies including stratification systems based on gender (Glick & S. T. Fiske, 2001;Jost & Kay, 2005;Laurin, Shepherd, & Kay, 2010), race (Jost, Pelham, & Carvallo, 2002), and economic circumstance (Kay, Czaplinski, & Jost, 2009;Kay & Jost, 2003;Malahy, Rubinlicht, & Kaiser, 2009). From a system justification perspective, therefore, support for hierarchies is often a means of fulfilling the broader motivation to believe that one's social systems are legitimate.…”

Section: Social Hierarchiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Friesen

Kay

Eibach

et al. 2014

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178

140

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 forms of social organization. This hypothesis is rooted in compensatory control theory, which posits that (a) individuals have a basic need to perceive the world as orderly and structured, and (b) personal and external sources of control are capable of satisfying this need because both serve the comforting belief that the world operates in an orderly fashion. Our first 2 studies confirmed that hierarchies were perceived as more structured and orderly relative to egalitarian arrangements (Study 1) and that working in a hierarchical workplace promotes a feeling of self-efficacy (Study 2). We threatened participants’ sense of personal control and measured perceptions of and preferences for hierarchy in 5 subsequent experiments. Participants who lacked control perceived more hierarchy occurring in ambiguous social situations (Study 3) and preferred hierarchy more strongly in workplace contexts (Studies 4–5). We also provide evidence that hierarchies are indeed appealing because of their structure: Preference for hierarchy was higher among individuals high in Personal Need for Structure and a control threat increased preference for hierarchy even among participants low in Personal Need for Structure (Study 5). Framing a hierarchy as unstructured reversed the effect of control threat on hierarchy (Study 6). Finally, hierarchy-enhancing jobs were more appealing after control threat, even when they were low in power and status (Study 7).

“…Afterwards, participants were asked about their opinions on politics in general, as well as on the entertainment industry. The former was measured via an established measure of system support (Kay & Jost, 2003) and the latter served as an unrelated comparison system.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Past work on system justification has demonstrated that systems are defended, in part, because they provide a sense of predictability and order in a sometimes unpredictable world, that is, they can serve as an external source of control (Jost & Hunyady, 2005;Kay & Jost, 2003;Kay, Shepherd, et al, 2010; see also Lerner, 1980). Thus, a more specific way to examine whether the system justification motive influences the defense of committed relationship values would be to assess whether perception of relationships as a means of external control contributes to the defense of this ideology.…”

Section: Study 4: Relationships As a Perceived Source Of Structure Omentioning

confidence: 99%

“…These measures indexed endorsement of the Canadian socio-political system and endorsement of an irrelevant system-the entertainment industry. For the former, an established measure of socio-political system support was employed (Kay & Jost, 2003), in which participants were asked to indicate their agreement with eight system justifying statements (α = .87), on a 9-point scale (1 = strongly disagree, 9 = strongly agree). Example statements include -In general, Canadian society is fair,‖ and -Canadian society needs to be radically restructured,‖ (reverse scored).…”

Section: Dependent Measuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

System justification and the defense of committed relationship ideology.

Day

Kay²,

Holmes

et al. 2011

Self Cite

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 investigated the extent to which the system justification motive may contribute to the adoption of this ideology. In Studies 1 and 2, we examined whether a heightened motive to maintain the status quo would increase defense of committed relationship values. In Study 3, we examined the reverse association, that is, whether a threat to committed relationship ideology would also affect sociopolitical system endorsement. As past research has found that the justification of political systems depends upon how much these systems are perceived as controlling, in Study 4 we tested whether the defense of the system of committed relationships would also increase when framed as controlling. Results from Studies 1–4 were consistent with our hypotheses, but only for men. In Study 5, using cross-cultural data, we sought to replicate these findings correlationally and probe for a cause of the gender effect. Results from more than 33,000 respondents indicated a relationship (for men) between defense of the sociopolitical system and defense of marriage in countries where the traditional advantages of men over women were most threatened. In Studies 6 and 7, we investigated when this gender difference disappears. Results revealed that when we measured (Study 6) or manipulated (Study 7) personal relationship identity rather than relationship ideology, effects also emerge for women.