Does Inequality Beget Inequality? Experimental Tests of the Prediction that Inequality Increases System Justification Motivation

Abstract

Past research shows that growing inequality often does not result in citizen demands for redistribution. We examine one mechanism that could explain why people do not protest growing inequality: a particular sub-prediction of system justification theory (SJT). SJT argues that humans have a psychological need to justify their social system. The specific sub-prediction of SJT tested here is the idea that inequality itself increases system justification. This could yield a negative feedback loop in which political responses to inequality grows ever less likely as inequality grows more extreme. Previous research on this hypothesis relied on cross-sectional survey data and provided mixed results. We take an experimental approach and ask whether exposure to economic inequality makes people more likely to defend the system. In one main study and two replications with varying samples, experimental treatments, and outcome measures, we find no evidence that information about economic inequality increases system justification motivation.

A critical review of the (un)conscious basis for system‐supporting attitudes of the disadvantaged

“…Trump and White's () experimental data corroborated Brandt's () null evidence, and Caricati and Sollami's (, ) experimental evidence suggests that the status–legitimacy effect may be caused by group interests. However, others have pointed out that the null results with respect to the status–legitimacy hypothesis could have been due to methodological artefacts (Sengupta, Osborne, & Sibley, ).…”

Revisiting 25 years of system motivation explanation for system justification from the perspective of social identity model of system attitudes

“…There are empirical problems with this ‘strong form of the system justification hypothesis’ (Jost, Pelham et al ., ; p. 18). Contrary to SJT, the preponderance of the evidence suggests that system‐justifying attitudes are more strongly held by those who are advantaged by the existing order rather than those who are disadvantaged by it (e.g., the subjectively and objectively higher classes in 36 nations, Caricati, ; attractive people, Westfall, Millar, & Lovitt, ; see also Bratanova, Loughnan, Klein, & Wood, ) or ‘most often directly contrary’ to the strong version of the system justification thesis (Brandt, , p. 765), and this null evidence persists even when inequality is experimentally manipulated (Trump & White, ). It is possible, then, that the initial observations in support of the strong system justification thesis could have been unrepresentative or even a false‐positive result as Brandt () has pointed out.…”

“…To be clear, we acknowledge that the strong dissonance‐based version of system justification is only a part of the broader system justification theory (Jost, ). Nonetheless, there is a reason why this strong version has been a particular research focus in recent years (e.g., Brandt, ; Brandt et al ., ; Caricati, ; Caricati & Lorenzi‐Cioldi, ; Caricati & Sollami, ; Henry & Saul, ; Kelemen, Szabó, Mészáros, László, & Forgas, ; Owuamalam, Rubin, & Issmer, ; Owuamalam, Rubin, & Spears, ; Owuamalam et al ., ; Trump & White, ; Van der Toorn et al ., ; Vargas‐Salfate, Paez, Liu et al ., 2018; Yang, Guo, Hu, Shu, & Li, ). The reason is not only because it provides the most distinctive prediction of system attitudes relative to other theories, such as social identity theory, but also because it is, in our view, the litmus test for an autonomous system justification motivation (see also Brandt, for a similar view).…”

System Justification Among the Disadvantaged: A Triadic Social Stratification Perspective

“…The unsurportive evidence for SJT's dissonance-inspired explanation is not limited to cross-sectional studies. Experimental studies also report contradictory evidence (e.g., Trump and White, 2018;Owuamalam and Spears, 2020), even when a sense of poverty (vs. affluence) is experimentally induced: people tend to show a greater inclination toward challenging unequal systems by, for example, a fair allocation of rewards to the relevant parties (Bratanova et al, 2016). 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.…”