Annemarie Loseman

The society-supporting self: system justification and cultural worldview defense as different forms of self-regulation

Justifying social systems and defending cultural worldviews may seem to resemble the same human need to protect what is known and predictable. The current paper would like to argue that these society-supporting tendencies concern two different forms of self-regulation: the need for control and the need for meaning. Results show higher levels of system justification when participants were lacking control than when they had to think about death or about a control topic. Simultaneously, participants showed stronger worldview defense reactions when they thought about their own death, compared to those experiencing low control. This suggests that system justification may be used to compensate a loss of personal control, while cultural worldviews protect the person from existential anxiety.

Exploring how people respond to conflicts between self‐interest and fairness: Influence of threats to the self on affective reactions to advantageous inequity

Two studies examined how people deal with conflicts between their self-interest concerns and their striving for fairness. Specifically, the affective reactions to outcome arrangements in which people receive better outcomes than comparable other persons, were studied. These arrangements of advantageous inequity constitute situations in which fairness and self-interest concerns are in conflict. Building on the social psychology of the self, it was predicted, and found, in both field and lab experiments that when people experience a self-threat, they react more positively to arrangements of advantageous inequity than when not experiencing this threat. This supports the view that peoples need for positive information about their selves is an important factor in the underlying psychological processes of the way that people deal with conflicts between their fairness and self-interest concerns.