Aaron C. Kay

Exposure to Benevolent Sexism and Complementary Gender Stereotypes: Consequences for Specific and Diffuse Forms of System Justification

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 specific types of gender-related beliefs and subsequently asked them to complete measures of gender-specific or diffuse system justification. In Studies 1 and 2, activating (a) communal or complementary (communal + agentic) gender stereotypes or (b) benevolent or complementary (benevolent + hostile) sexist items increased support for the status quo among women. In Study 3, activating stereotypes of men as agentic also increased system justification among men and women, but only when womens characteristics were associated with higher status. Results suggest that complementary stereotypes psychologically offset the one-sided advantage of any single group and contribute to an image of society in which everyone benefits through a balanced dispersion of benefits.

God and the Government: Testing a Compensatory Control Mechanism for the Support of External Systems

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. Three experiments demonstrated a causal relation between lowered perceptions of personal control and the defense of external systems, including increased beliefs in the existence of a controlling God (Studies 1 and 2) and defense of the overarching socio-political system (Study 4). A 4th experiment (Study 5) showed the converse to be true: A challenge to the usefulness of external systems of control led to increased illusory perceptions of personal control. In addition, a cross-national data set demonstrated that lower levels of personal control are associated with higher support for governmental control (across 67 nations; Study 3). Each study identified theoretically consistent moderators and mediators of these effects. The implications of these results for understanding why a high percentage of the population believes in the existence of God, and why people so often endorse and justify their socio-political systems, are discussed.

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

How powerful is the status quo in determining peoples 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.e., as the most representative of how things should be); (b) that this tendency is driven, at least in part, by peoples desire to justify their sociopolitical systems; and (c) that injunctification has profound implications for the maintenance of inequality and societal change. Four studies, across a variety of domains, provided supportive evidence. When the motivation to justify the sociopolitical system was experimentally heightened, participants injunctified extant (a) political power (Study 1), (b) public funding policies (Study 2), and (c) unequal gender demographics in the political and business spheres (Studies 3 and 4, respectively). It was also demonstrated that this motivated phenomenon increased derogation of those who act counter to the status quo (Study 4). Theoretical implications for system justification theory, stereotype formation, affirmative action, and the maintenance of inequality are discussed.

Victim Derogation and Victim Enhancement as Alternate Routes to System Justification

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 reconcile these seemingly contradictory findings by proposing that victim derogation and victim enhancement are alternate routes to system justification, with the preferred route depending on the perception of a causal link between trait and outcome. Derogating “losers” (and lionizing “winners”) on traits (e.g., intelligence) that are causally related to outcomes (e.g., wealth vs. poverty) serves to increase system justification, as does compensating “losers” (and down-grading “winners”) on traits (e.g., physical attractiveness) that are causally unrelated to those outcomes. We provide converging evidence using system-threat and stereotype-activation paradigms.

Compensatory Control: Achieving Order Through the Mind, Our Institutions, and the Heavens

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 control is threatened, people can preserve a sense of order by (a) perceiving patterns in noise or adhering to superstitions and conspiracies, (b) defending the legitimacy of the sociopolitical institutions that offer control, or (c) believing in an interventionist God. We also present evidence that these processes of compensatory control help people cope with the anxiety and discomfort that lacking personal control fuels, that it is lack of personal control specifically and not general threat or negativity that drives these processes, and that these various forms of compensatory control are ultimately substitutable for one another. Our model of compensatory control offers insight into a wide variety of phenomena, from prejudice to the idiosyncratic rituals of professional athletes to societal rituals around weddings, graduations, and funerals.

Sour Grapes, Sweet Lemons, and the Anticipatory Rationalization of the Status Quo

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 studies, the authors found that people adjusted their judgments of the desirability of a future event to make them congruent with its perceived likelihood, but only when the event triggered motivational involvement. In Study 1, a political survey administered to 288 Democrats, Republicans, and nonpartisans prior to the Bush-Gore presidential election manipulated the perceived likelihood that each candidate would win and measured the subjective desirability of each outcome. In Study 2, 203 undergraduate students rated the desirability of a large or small tuition increase or decrease that was low, medium, or high in likelihood. Under conditions evoking high motivational involvement, unfavorable as well as favorable outcomes were judged to be more desirable as their perceived likelihood increased.

Religious Belief as Compensatory Control

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 serve as external forms of control that can compensate for manipulations that lower personal control and (b) religious conviction can also serve as compensatory personal control after experimental manipulations that lower other forms of personal or external control. The authors review dispositional factors that differentially orient individuals toward external or personal varieties of compensatory control and conclude that compensatory religious conviction can be a flexible source of personal and external control for relief from the anxiety associated with random and uncertain experiences.

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

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 Voltaires famous character, Dr. Pangloss, who believed that he was “living in the best of all possible worlds.” One of the means by which people idealize existing social arrangements is by relying on complementary (or compensatory) stereotypes, which ascribe compensating virtues to the disadvantaged and corresponding vices to the advantaged, thereby creating an “illusion of equality.” In this chapter, we summarize a program of research demonstrating that (1) incidental exposure to complementary gender and status stereotypes leads people to show enhanced ideological support for the status quo and (2) when the legitimacy or stability of the system is threatened, people often respond by using complementary stereotypes to bolster the system. We also show that (noncomplementary) victim‐blaming and (complementary) victim‐enhancement represent alternate routes to system justification. In addition, we consider a number of situational and dispositional moderating variables that affect the use and effectiveness of complementary and noncomplementary representations, and we discuss the broader implications of stereotyping and other forms of rationalization that are adopted in the service of system justification. From time to time, Pangloss would say to Candide: There is a chain of events in this best of all possible worlds; for if you had not been turned out of a beautiful mansion at the point of a jackboot for love of Lady Cunegonde, if you had not been clamped into the Inquisition, if you had not wandered about America on foot, and had not struck the Baron with your sword, and lost all those sheep you brought from Eldorado, you would not be here eating candied fruit and pistachio nuts. “Thats true enough,” said Candide; “but we must go and work in the garden.” —Voltaire, 1758/1947, Candide or Optimism , p. 144

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

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). Consistent with this, past research demonstrates that, when personal control is threatened, people defend external systems of control, such as God and government. This theoretical perspective also suggests that belief in God and support for governmental systems, although seemingly disparate, will exhibit a hydraulic relationship with one another. Using both experimental and longitudinal designs in Eastern and Western cultures, the authors demonstrate that experimental manipulations or naturally occurring events (e.g., electoral instability) that lower faith in one of these external systems (e.g., the government) lead to subsequent increases in faith in the other (e.g., God). In addition, mediation and moderation analyses suggest that specific concerns with order and structure underlie these hydraulic effects. Implications for the psychological, sociocultural, and sociopolitical underpinnings of religious faith, as well as system justification theory, are discussed.

Randomness, Attributions of Arousal, and Belief in God

Beliefs in God, or similar spiritual forces, have permeated every culture the world has seen, past or present (Atran & Norenzayan, 2004). Although there are likely many reasons why such beliefs are so strongly held (Kirkpatrick, 1998; Norenzayan & Hansen, 2006), attempts to cope with perceptions of randomness may be a key factor. Randomness is presumed to be highly aversive (Pennebaker & Stone, 2004), and people will go to considerable lengths to reaffirm order in the face of evidence to the contrary (e.g., by blaming victims of random misfortune or seeing patterns in random arrays; Jost, Banaji, & Nosek, 2004; Lerner, 1980; Whitson & Galinsky, 2008; also see Heine, Proulx, & Vohs, 2006). Affirming the existence of a controlling God, therefore, may provide an excellent means for insulating oneself from the aversive arousal associated with randomness. However, no experimental test of this hypothesis exists. Park (2005) has suggested that traumatic events can strengthen belief in God because of the threat they pose to nonrandomness, but this correlational research (also see Laurin, Kay, & Moscovitch, 2008) focused only on negative events and assumed (rather than directly assessed) the role of randomness. Some research has manipulated self-conceptions that may be related to preserving beliefs in order (e.g., Kay, Gaucher, Napier, Callan, & Laurin, 2008; McGregor, Haji, Nash, & Teper, 2008), but none has investigated randomness directly, and none, crucially, has assessed the role of arousal in generating between-condition differences in belief in God. In this study, we employed a novel paradigm to test (a) whether direct manipulations designed to prime thoughts of randomness cause increased beliefs in supernatural sources of control (even when controlling for negative valence) and (b) whether this effect is due to arousal generated by thoughts of randomness. To heighten thoughts of randomness, we supraliminally primed half the participants with randomness-related words; the other half were primed with words matched in negative valence. To assess the role of arousal, we employed a misattribution paradigm (Zanna & Cooper, 1974), which involved requiring all participants to swallow a pill ostensibly containing an herbal supplement. Half the participants were told that the pill sometimes induces arousal as a side effect, and half were told that the pill has no side effects. Previous work has shown that the side-effect condition leads participants to attribute the cause of any experienced arousal to this salient source (Proulx & Heine, 2008; Zanna & Cooper, 1974). Hypothesizing that beliefs in supernatural control function, at least in part, to down-regulate the aversive arousal associated with randomness, we expected the randomness primes to increase beliefs in God, but only for those participants not given the opportunity to attribute the cause of their arousal to the ingested pill.