TY - JOUR
T1 - System justification enhances well-being
T2 - A longitudinal analysis of the palliative function of system justification in 18 countries
AU - Vargas-Salfate, Salvador
AU - Paez, Dario
AU - Khan, Sammyh S.
AU - Liu, James H.
AU - Gil de Zúñiga, Homero
N1 - Funding Information:
This research was supported by Grant FA2386-15-1-0003 from the Asian Office of Aerospace Research and Development. This article was partially supported by the grant PPSI2014-51923-P to Dario Paez.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 The British Psychological Society
PY - 2018/7
Y1 - 2018/7
N2 - According to the palliative function of ideology hypothesis proposed by System Justification Theory, endorsing system-justifying beliefs is positively related to general psychological well-being, because this fulfils existential, epistemic, and relational needs. We discuss and address three main issues: (1) the role of societal inequality, (2) comparisons by social status, and (3) cross-sectional versus longitudinal research. We used a longitudinal survey of representative online samples (N = 5,901) from 18 countries. The results supported the main argument proposed by the theory, in that system justification was positively and significantly related to life satisfaction and negatively related to anxiety and depression. The pattern of results suggested that the palliative function of system justification is more homogeneously distributed across individual and collective measures of social status than proposed by the theory, because the function was unaffected either by society-level inequality or by individual-level social status. These results allow us to infer that one of the reasons for the high stability of social arrangements is located in the psychological domain of palliative effects.
AB - According to the palliative function of ideology hypothesis proposed by System Justification Theory, endorsing system-justifying beliefs is positively related to general psychological well-being, because this fulfils existential, epistemic, and relational needs. We discuss and address three main issues: (1) the role of societal inequality, (2) comparisons by social status, and (3) cross-sectional versus longitudinal research. We used a longitudinal survey of representative online samples (N = 5,901) from 18 countries. The results supported the main argument proposed by the theory, in that system justification was positively and significantly related to life satisfaction and negatively related to anxiety and depression. The pattern of results suggested that the palliative function of system justification is more homogeneously distributed across individual and collective measures of social status than proposed by the theory, because the function was unaffected either by society-level inequality or by individual-level social status. These results allow us to infer that one of the reasons for the high stability of social arrangements is located in the psychological domain of palliative effects.
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U2 - 10.1111/bjso.12254
DO - 10.1111/bjso.12254
M3 - Article
C2 - 29577342
AN - SCOPUS:85044474051
SN - 0144-6665
VL - 57
SP - 567
EP - 590
JO - British Journal of Social Psychology
JF - British Journal of Social Psychology
IS - 3
ER -
