Legislation, Linguistics, and Location: Exploring Attitudes on Unauthorized Immigration

Contemporary discourse on domestic immigration policy varies widely based on political affiliation, linguistics, and regional differences. This experimental study aimed to concurrently investigate three social psychological bases of attitudes towards unauthorized immigrants in the United States: political ideology, social labels, and social context. Participants were 744 adults, recruited from “New York Community College” (“NYCC”/urban) and “New Jersey Community College” (“NJCC”/suburban), who were randomly assigned to one of two experimental conditions: “illegal” vs. “undocumented”. Participants completed a scale measuring their attitudes towards unauthorized immigrants with the embedded label manipulation, followed by the General System Justification scale, and culminating with demographic items. Results demonstrated that whereas social context and political ideology both contributed significantly to the regression model, the social labels did not. Both high system justification and political conservatism predicted negative attitudes, but the latter effect was stronger for suburban students. Post-hoc analyses revealed a significant difference between suburban and urban students in the frequency of the social labels “illegal” and “undocumented” heard and seen among family members, friends, and the media. Implications are discussed with a focus on system justification as an explanatory theory for immigration attitudes, as well as contextual effects for it

Ideology and the limits of self-interest: System justification motivation and conservative advantages in mass politics

It is commonly assumed that political attitudes are driven by self-interest and that poor people heavily favor policies aimed at redistributing wealth. This assumption fails to explain the popularity of economic conservatism and the degree of support for the capitalist system. Such outcomes are typically explained by the suggestion that most poor people believe they will become rich one day. In a representative sample of low-income Americans, we observed that less than one-fourth were optimistic about their economic prospects. Those respondents who believed that they would become rich one day were no more likely to endorse the legitimacy of the system and no more supportive of conservative ideology or the Republican Party, compared to those who did not believe they would become rich. From a system justification perspective, we propose that people are motivated to defend the social systems on which they depend, and this confers a psychological advantage to conservative ideology. Providing ideological support for the status quo serves epistemic motives to reduce uncertainty, existential motives to reduce threat, and relational motives to share reality with members of mainstream society. We summarize evidence from the United States, Argentina, Lebanon, and other countries bearing on these propositions—including a survey administered shortly before the 2016 U.S. Presidential election—and discuss political implications of system justification motivation.Fil: Jost, John T.. University of New York; Estados UnidosFil: Langer, Melanie. University of New York; Estados UnidosFil: Badaan, Vivienne. University of New York; Estados UnidosFil: Azevedo, Flávio. Universitat Zu Köln; AlemaniaFil: Etchezahar, Edgardo Daniel. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Saavedra 15. Centro Interdisciplinario de Investigaciones en Psicología Matemática y Experimental Dr. Horacio J. A. Rimoldi; ArgentinaFil: Ungaretti, Joaquín. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Saavedra 15. Centro Interdisciplinario de Investigaciones en Psicología Matemática y Experimental Dr. Horacio J. A. Rimoldi; ArgentinaFil: Hennes, Erin P.. Purdue University; Estados Unido

Neoliberalism and the ideological construction of equity beliefs

Researchers across disciplines, including psychology, have sought to understand how people evaluate the fairness of resource distributions. Equity, defined as proportionality of rewards to merit, has dominated the conceptualization of distributive justice in psychology, with some scholars casting it as the primary basis on which distributive decisions are made. The present paper acts as a corrective to this disproportionate emphasis on equity. Drawing on findings from different subfields, we argue that people possess a range of beliefs about how valued resources should be allocated—beliefs that vary systematically across developmental stages, relationship types, and societies. By reinvigorating notions of distributive justice put forth by the field’s pioneers, we further argue that prescriptive beliefs concerning resource allocation are ideological formations embedded in socioeconomic and historical contexts. Fairness beliefs at the micro-level are thus shaped by those beliefs’ macro-level instantiations. In a novel investigation of this process, we consider neoliberalism, the globally-dominant socioeconomic model of the past forty years. Using data from more than 160 countries, we uncover evidence that neoliberal economic structures shape equity-based distributive beliefs at the individual level. We conclude by advocating an integrative approach to the study of distributive justice that bridges micro- and macro-level analyses

LGBQ Inclusion in STEM: A Matter of Gender

This study explore the effect of experimentally manipulated gender essentialism (i.e., gender is binary, fixed, and biological) on gender-science stereotypes (i.e., science is masculine) and people's evaluation of LGBQs fit in STEM academic disciplines

Social Protest and Its Discontents

Psychological factors that encourage—as well as discourage— participation in social protest are often overlooked in the social sciences. In this article, we draw together recent contributions to the understanding of the social and psychological bases of political action and inaction from the perspective of system justification theory. This perspective, which builds on theory and research on the “belief in a just world,” contends that—because of underlying epistemic, existential, and relational needs to reduce uncertainty, threat, and social discord—people are motivated (to varying degrees, as a function of personality and context) to defend, bolster, and justify the legitimacy of the social, political, and economic systems on which they depend. We review evidence that, alongside political conservatism and religiosity, system justification helps to explain resistance and acquiescence to the status quo in sociopolitical contexts as diverse as Lebanon, New Zealand, Argentina, and the United States.Fil: Badaan, Vivienne. University of New York; Estados UnidosFil: Jost, John T.. University of New York; Estados UnidosFil: Osborne, Danny. University of Auckland; Nueva ZelandaFil: Sibley, Chris G.. University of Auckland; Nueva ZelandaFil: Ungaretti, Joaquín. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Psicología; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Etchezahar, Edgardo Daniel. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Psicología; ArgentinaFil: Hennes, Erin P.. Universidad Nacional de Lomas de Zamora. Facultad de Ciencias Sociales; Argentin