It’s no use pretending that what has obviously happened has not in fact happened. The upper 1 percent of Americans are now taking in nearly a quarter of the nation’s income every year. In terms of wealth rather than income, the top 1 percent control 40 percent. Their lot in life has improved considerably. Twenty-five years ago, the corresponding figures were 12 percent and 33 percent. One respo...

America as a nation has self-perpetuating needs that do not always align with the needs or beliefs of individual Americans. As much as Americans may love their country and way of life, they do not always explicitly agree with the policies that best serve to bolster and perpetuate the nation, such as unyielding diplomatic stances, unilateral military action, or giving up civil liberties in excha...

The U.S. presidential election of Donald Trump in 2016 was interpreted by many as a repudiation of the social and economic status quo. Others suggested that support for Trump reflected opposition to social change, as exemplified by the nostalgic slogan “Make America Great Again.” We consider the possibility that many American voters were indeed frustrated by the consequences of global competiti...

People are motivated to defend and rationalize the status quo, a phenomenon known as system justification. We propose the existence of a second, countervailing system-level motivation: system-change motivation, which is concerned with bettering the status quo over time. The opportunity to receive diagnostic information about the status quo pits the two system-level motives against each other. W...

Are hiring decisions affected by knowledge that a job applicant was previously laid off? We expected decisional biases to be linked with the motivational tendency to believe that society is fair and outcomes are just and deserved (hereafter, system justifying beliefs [SJBs]). Indeed, hiring decisions were more likely to disadvantage a laid off applicant as SJBs increased both when detailed job ...

In this article we report from a case study of a software development organization and we study in particular the developers’ and product managers’ attitudes towards integrating usability work into software development. We offer explanations based on system justification theory illuminating what would-be integrators might be up against. The analysis shows how the developers only pay lip service...

within the linguistic paradigm, there is a problem that was always connected with coherence conceptions of truth: how we may, in light of the evidence available to us, raise an unconditional truth claim that aims beyond what is justified. in other words, within the linguistic paradigm, if the truth of a proposition can no longer be conceived as correspondence with something in the world, then h...