Disentangling Reasons and Rationalizations: Exploring Perceived Fairness in Hypothetical Societies

Political psychologists often treat explicit explanations for political views as rationalizations rather than reasons and favor unconscious motives and cognitive processes as the key determinants of political ideology. We argue that "transparent-motive" theories are often dismissed too quickly in favor of "subterranean-motive" theories. We devote this chapter to finding common methodological ground for clarifying, testing, and circumscribing the claims of both the transparent-motivational theorists and the subterranean-motivational theorists, and we pose a series of empirical questions designed to explore predictions that might provide evidence that justifications are not mere by-products of the functional imperative to defend the status quo but rather functionally autonomous constellations of ideas capable of independently influencing policy

[1]  James Konow,et al.  Blind Spots: The Effects of Information and Stakes on Fairness Bias and Dispersion , 2005 .

[2]  John T. Jost,et al.  An Experimental Replication of the Depressed-Entitlement Effect Among Women , 1997 .

[3]  B. Mellers,et al.  Psychological perspectives on justice: Trade-offs in fairness and preference judgments , 1993 .

[4]  M. Bunge.  The Weight of Simplicity in the Construction and Assaying of Scientific Theories , 1961, Philosophy of Science.

[5]  B. Major,et al.  System-Justifying Beliefs and Psychological Well-Being: The Roles of Group Status and Identity , 2005, Personality & social psychology bulletin.

[6]  J. Graham,et al.  When Morality Opposes Justice: Conservatives Have Moral Intuitions that Liberals may not Recognize , 2007 .

[7]  Christina Fong.  Which Beliefs Matter for Redistributive Politics? Target-Specific versus General Beliefs About the Causes of Income , 2004 .

[8]  P. Tetlock,et al.  Churchill's Cognitive and Rhetorical Style: The Debates Over Nazi Intentions and Self-Government for India , 1996 .

[9]  George Loewenstein,et al.  Biased Judgments of Fairness in Bargaining , 1995 .

[10]  Linda J. Skitka,et al.  Allocating scarce resources : a contingency model of distributive justice , 1992 .

[11]  Philip E. Tetlock,et al.  Impression management versus intrapsychic explanations in social psychology - a useful dichotomy , 1985 .

[12]  James Fishkin.  The Dialogue of Justice , 1993 .

[13]  J. Jost,et al.  Placating the Powerless: Effects of Legitimate and Illegitimate Explanation on Affect, Memory, and Stereotyping , 2000 .

[14]  G. Blasi,et al.  System Justification Theory and Research: Implications for Law, Legal Advocacy, and Social Justice , 2006 .

[15]  Herbert Gintis,et al.  Reciprocity and the Welfare State , 2004 .

[16]  Shelley E. Taylor,et al.  Illusion and well-being: a social psychological perspective on mental health. , 1988, Psychological bulletin.

[17]  S. Coleman.  Thought Experiments and Personal Identity , 2000 .

[18]  Kim Forde-Mazrui,et al.  Taking Conservatives Seriously: A Moral Justification for Affirmative Action and Reparations , 2004 .

[19]  M. Hewstone,et al.  Social Identity, System Justification, and Social Dominance: Commentary on Reicher, Jost et al., and Sidanius et al. , 2004 .

[20]  C. Mills.  Situated Actions and Vocabularies of Motive , 1940 .

[21]  J. Elster.  The Empirical Study of Justice , 1995 .

[22]  D. Kahneman,et al.  Would You Be Happier If You Were Richer? A Focusing Illusion , 2006, Science.

[23]  Philip E. Tetlock,et al.  TARGET ARTICLE: Attributions of Implicit Prejudice, or "Would Jesse Jackson 'Fail' the Implicit Association Test?" , 2004 .

[24]  Brian A. Nosek,et al.  A Decade of System Justification Theory: Accumulated Evidence of Conscious and Unconscious Bolstering of the Status Quo , 2004 .

[25]  P. Tetlock,et al.  The Slavery Debate in Antebellum America: Cognitive Style, Value Conflict, and the Limits of Compromise , 1994 .

[26]  T. Tyler,et al.  Moral Outrage Mediates the Dampening Effect of System Justification on Support for Redistributive Social Policies , 2007, Psychological science.

[27]  Jerald Greenberg,et al.  Overcoming Egocentric Bias in Perceived Fairness Through Self-Awareness , 1983 .

[28]  J. Jost,et al.  Political conservatism as motivated social cognition. , 2003, Psychological bulletin.

[29]  Robert Edward Rubin,et al.  In an Uncertain World: Tough Choices from Wall Street to Washington , 2003 .

[30]  H. Frankfurt.  The importance of what we care about: Equality as a moral ideal , 1987 .

[31]  I. Berlin.  The Crooked Timber of Humanity , 1990 .

[32]  E. Weinrib.  Corrective Justice in a Nutshell , 2002 .

[33]  J. Ferrie.  History Lessons: The End of American Exceptionalism? Mobility in the United States Since 1850 , 2005 .

[34]  R. McDermott.  Risk-taking in international politics : prospect theory in American foreign policy , 1998 .

[35]  N. Frohlich,et al.  A role for structured observation in ethics , 1997 .

[36]  P. Tetlock,et al.  Symbolic Racism: Problems of Motive Attribution in Political Analysis , 1986 .

[37]  L. Souder.  What Are We to Think about Thought Experiments? , 2003 .

[38]  J. Jost.  Negative illusions: conceptual clarification and psychological evidence concerning false consciousness , 1995 .

[39]  M. Banaji,et al.  The role of stereotyping in system‐justification and the production of false consciousness , 1994 .

[40]  J. Knetsch,et al.  Fragile Redistribution Choices Behind a Veil of Ignorance , 1997 .

[41]  Daniel Kahneman,et al.  Fairness as a Constraint on Profit Seeking , 1986 .

[42]  M. Yaari,et al.  Psychological perspectives on justice: Judgments of distributive justice , 1993 .

[43]  J. Jost,et al.  Non-conscious Forms of System Justification: Cognitive, Affective, and Behavioral Preferences for Higher Status Groups , 2000 .

[44]  L. Skitka.  Ideological and Attributional Boundaries on Public Compassion: Reactions to Individuals and Communities Affected by a Natural Disaster , 1999 .

[45]  J. Jost,et al.  Group-based dominance and opposition to equality as independent predictors of self-esteem, ethnocentrism, and social policy attitudes among african americans and european americans , 2000 .

[46]  Joshua Knobe,et al.  Thought experiments. , 2011, Scientific American.

[47]  C. Frith.  Social cognition , 2008, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

[48]  Norman Frohlich,et al.  Choosing Justice: An Experimental Approach to Ethical Theory , 1992 .

[49]  James Konow,et al.  Which Is the Fairest One of All? A Positive Analysis of Justice Theories , 2003 .

[50]  Richard E. Matland,et al.  Doing Rawls Justice: An Experimental Study of Income Distribution Norms , 2003 .

[51]  P. Tetlock,et al.  Experiments Behind the Veil: Structural Influences on Judgments of Social Justice , 2003 .

[52]  Norman Frohlich,et al.  Elements of Reason: How People Reason about Ethics , 2000 .

[53]  Matthew N. Diascro,et al.  How Americans Think about Trade: Reconciling Conflicts among Money, Power, and Principles , 2001 .

[54]  F. Pratto,et al.  Legitimizing ideologies: The social dominance approach. , 2001 .

[55]  John T. Jost,et al.  Attitudinal Ambivalence and the Conflict between Group and System Justification Motives in Low Status Groups , 2000 .

[56]  Philip E. Tetlock,et al.  A value pluralism model of ideological reasoning , 1986 .

[57]  J. Jost,et al.  Non-conscious forms of system justification: Implicit and behavioral preferences for higher status groups , 2002 .

[58]  Aaron C. Kay,et al.  Sour Grapes, Sweet Lemons, and the Anticipatory Rationalization of the Status Quo , 2002 .

[59]  P. Brickman,et al.  Preference for Inequality. , 1977 .

[60]  P. Tetlock,et al.  Attribution bias: On the inconclusiveness of the cognition-motivation debate , 1982 .

[61]  Randall S. Peterson,et al.  Revising the value pluralism model: Incorporating social content and context postulates. , 1996 .

[62]  Philip E. Tetlock,et al.  People as intuitive prosecutors: The impact of social-control goals on attributions of responsibility , 2007 .

[63]  Aaron C. Kay,et al.  Social and Psychological Bases of Ideology and System Justification , 2009 .

[64]  S. Stich,et al.  Semantics, cross-cultural style , 2004, Cognition.

[65]  M. Pillutla,et al.  Fairness in Bargaining , 2003 .

[66]  R. E. Redding.  Bias on Prejudice? The Politics of Research on Prejudice , 2004 .

[67]  Richard E. Matland,et al.  Just Deserts: An Experimental Study of Distributive Justice Norms , 2001 .

[68]  N. Epley,et al.  Egocentric Ethics , 2004 .

[69]  B. Mellers,et al.  Judgments of Social Justice: Compromises Between Equality and Efficiency , 1993 .

[70]  Christina Fong.  Prospective Mobility, Fairness, and the Demand for Redistribution , 2006 .

[71]  P. Tetlock,et al.  An Empirical Inquiry into the Relation of Corrective Justice to Distributive Justice , 2006 .

[72]  L. Frank.  Psychopathology and Politics.Harold D. Lasswell , 1931 .

[73]  J. Darley,et al.  The Psychology of Compensatory and Retributive Justice , 2003, Personality and social psychology review : an official journal of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc.

[74]  J. R. Kluegel,et al.  Accounting for the Rich and the Poor: Existential Justice in Comparative Perspective , 1995 .

[75]  J. Pfeffer,et al.  Fair-Market Ideology: Its Cognitive-Motivational Underpinnings , 2003 .

[76]  Gráinne M. Fitzsimons,et al.  The ideological animal: A system justification view , 2004 .

[77]  S. Liebig.  Lessons from Philosophy? Interdisciplinary Justice Research and Two Classes of Justice Judgments , 2001 .

[78]  R. Herrnstein,et al.  The bell curve : intelligence and class structure in American life , 1995 .

[79]  P. Tetlock,et al.  Psychological perspectives on justice: Of ants and grasshoppers: The political psychology of allocating public assistance , 1993 .

[80]  J. Jost,et al.  The psychology of system justification and the palliative function of ideology , 2002 .