Steven Shepherd

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.

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

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 intuitively expect that a lack of knowledge would motivate an increased, unbiased search for information, thereby facilitating participation and engagement in these issues-especially when they are consequential, pressing, and self-relevant. However, there appears to be a discrepancy between the importance/self-relevance of social issues and peoples willingness to engage with and learn about them. Leveraging the literature on system justification theory (Jost & Banaji, 1994), the authors hypothesized that, rather than motivating an increased search for information, a lack of knowledge about a specific sociopolitical issue will (a) foster feelings of dependence on the government, which will (b) increase system justification and government trust, which will (c) increase desires to avoid learning about the relevant issue when information is negative or when information valence is unknown. In other words, the authors suggest that ignorance-as a function of the system justifying tendencies it may activate-may, ironically, breed more ignorance. In the contexts of energy, environmental, and economic issues, the authors present 5 studies that (a) provide evidence for this specific psychological chain (i.e., ignorance about an issue → dependence → government trust → avoidance of information about that issue); (b) shed light on the role of threat and motivation in driving the second and third links in this chain; and (c) illustrate the unfortunate consequences of this process for individual action in those contexts that may need it most.

Restricted Emigration, System Inescapability, and Defense of the Status Quo System-Justifying Consequences of Restricted Exit Opportunities

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 violating the right to mobility. Our results suggest that, ironically, restricted freedom of movement can lead to increased system justification (i.e., increased support of the status quo). In Study 1, we found that participants who read that their country was difficult to leave became stronger defenders of their system’s legitimacy than before, even in domains unrelated to emigration policy (e.g., gender relations). In Study 2, we demonstrated that this increased system defense was the result of a motivated process. In Study 3, we broadened the scope of this psychological phenomenon by conceptually replicating it using a different system (participants’ university) and measure of system defense. The importance of these two findings—the first experimental demonstration of the psychological consequences of restrictive emigration policies and the introduction of a novel psychological phenomenon—is discussed.

Rewriting the Self-Fulfilling Prophecy of Social Rejection Self-Affirmation Improves Relational Security and Social Behavior up to 2 Months Later

Chronically insecure individuals often behave in ways that result in the very social rejection that they most fear. We predicted that this typical self-fulfilling prophecy is not immutable. Self-affirmation may improve insecure individuals’ relational security, and this improvement may allow them to express more welcoming social behavior. In a longitudinal experiment, a 15-min self-affirmation improved both the relational security and experimenter-rated social behavior of insecure participants up to 4 weeks after the initial intervention. Moreover, the extent to which self-affirmation improved insecure participants’ relational security at 4 weeks predicted additional improvements in social behavior another 4 weeks after that. Our finding that insecure participants continued to reap the social benefits of self-affirmation up to 8 weeks after the initial intervention demonstrates that it is indeed possible to rewrite the self-fulfilling prophecy of social rejection.

Compensatory Institutional Trust: A “Dark Side” of Trust

Trust scholars emphasize the importance of trust research given that trust is integral to societal functioning. However, evidence suggests there is a “dark side” to trust. We discuss a specific facet of the dark side of individuals’ trust in institutions, which we call compensatory institutional trust. We review theory and evidence suggesting that individuals’ trust in institutions can be generated in order to satisfy psychological needs. Specifically, when experiencing threats to safety, security, or a sense of meaning and understanding, individuals will sometimes trust institutions more than otherwise. A motivated increase in the perception that institutions are trustworthy may palliate existential and epistemic threats. We detail theoretical perspectives that speak to compensatory institutional trust, namely, terror management theory, theory on system-justifying beliefs, compensatory control theory, and the meaning maintenance model. We emphasize these perspectives’ relations to compensatory institutional trust by reviewing illustrative empirical examples of compensatory institutional trust-relevant processes. Altogether, we aim to illuminate the utility of the compensatory institutional trust framework in shedding light on psychological processes that may underlie findings in the trust literature. Ultimately, we make a call to trust researchers to not neglect addressing this dark side of institutional trust in their scholarship.

Do Difficult Decisions Motivate Belief in Fate? A Test in the Context of the 2012 U.S. Presidential Election:

Fate is a ubiquitous supernatural belief, spanning time and place. It exerts a range of positive and negative effects on health, coping, and both action and inaction (Franklin et al., 2007; Parker, Brewer, & Spencer, 1980; Specht, Egloff, & Schmukle, 2011). Despite these consequences, research aimed at understanding the antecedents of a belief in fate is surprisingly sparse, focusing on historical sociocultural sources, such as religious and cultural experiences (Leung & Bond, 2004; Norenzayan & Lee, 2010; Young, Morris, Burrus, Krishnan, & Regmi, 2011). Here, we examine whether belief in fate, beyond its cultural grounding, also varies with immediate situational pressures. What types of situations might predictably motivate belief in fate? We suggest that one such situation is decision difficulty. Decisions are difficult when no dominant option presents itself, either because options are not easily distinguishable or because all have pros and cons. When such decisions are also important to the decision maker and cannot be delayed, they can be stressful and aversive (Kagan, 1972). Belief in fate, defined as the belief that whatever happens was supposed to happen and that outcomes are ultimately predetermined (Norenzayan & Lee, 2010), may be especially useful when one is facing these types of difficult decisions. Deferring responsibility for complex issues and attributing events to external forces, such as governments or other powerful forces, can be psychologically palliative and can reduce stress (Laurin, Kay, & Moscovitch, 2008; Shepherd & Kay, 2012; Sullivan, Landau, & Rothschild, 2010). Fate’s promise of ensuring one predestined outcome may serve a similarly palliative function, especially in contexts of decision stress. Consequently, this belief may become especially attractive (and, therefore, seemingly true; Kunda, 1990) when people are faced with important decisions that are high in difficulty. In two studies, we tested this novel hypothesis using a real-world, important, imminent decision: which candidate to vote for in the 2012 U.S. presidential election.

Guns as a Source of Order and Chaos: Compensatory Control and the Psychological (Dis)Utility of Guns for Liberals and Conservatives

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 how the same underlying need to see the world as orderly and nonrandom can help explain both sides of this divide, with liberals (conservatives) seeing guns as a source of disorder (order) in the world. Across three experiments we find that when imagining holding a gun (vs. not), liberals report less personal control and in turn more negative emotion compared to conservatives. We also find that in situations that are inherently chaotic and disorderly (i.e., shootings), liberals see the introduction of another firearm (i.e., an armed citizen) as introducing more disorder into the situation, whereas conservatives see armed citizens as providing more order to the situation.

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

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 justification motive via complimentary stereotyping. Second, we describe injunctification as direct evidence of a tendency to view the extant status quo (the way things are) as the way things should be. Third, we elaborate on system justifications contextual nature and the circumstances, such as threat, dependence, inescapability, and system confidence, which are likely to elicit defensive bolstering of the status quo and motivated ignorance of critical social issues. Fourth, we describe how system justification theory can increase our understanding of both resistance to and acceptance of social change, as a change moves from proposed, to imminent, to established. Finally, we discuss how threatened systems shore up their authority by co-opting legitimacy from other sources, such as governments that draw on religious concepts, and the role of institutional-level factors in perpetuating the status quo.