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Political Ideologies and their Social Psychological FunctionsIn Michael Freeden, Lyman Tower Sargent & Marc Stears (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies, Oxford University Press. 2013.Ideology has re-emerged as a vital topic of investigation in social psychology. This chapter proposes that political ideologies possess both a discursive superstructure and a functional substructure and that ideologies serve social psychological functions that may not be entirely rational but help to explain why individuals are drawn to them. System justification, it argues, is the ‘glue’ that holds the two dimensions of left–right ideology together. To vindicate and uphold traditional instituti…Read more
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10Emotion shapes the diffusion of moralized content in social networksProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114 (28): 7313-7318. 2017.
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43Virtue ethics and the social psychology of character: Philosophical lessons from the person-situation debateJournal of Research in Personality 43 253-254. 2009.
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20Difficulties awakening the sense of injustice and overcoming oppression: On the soporific effects of system justificationIn Peter T. Coleman (ed.), Conflict, Interdependence, and Justice: The Intellectual Legacy of Morton Deutsch, Springer. pp. 227--246. 2011.
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25The Place of Values in a World of Politics: Personality, Motivation, and IdeologyIn Olson J. & Hirose J. (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Value, Oxford University Press. 2016.The current chapter discusses on the place of values in a world of politics: personality, motivation, and ideology. There are similarly daunting questions of a political or philosophical nature. If it is the case that value pluralism—if not outright conflict—is inevitable, what are the implications for democratic and related forms of governance? How might political institutions be designed so that citizens and policy makers alike will be able to absorb and tolerate ideological and other sources …Read more
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38The ideological animalIn Jeff Greenberg, Sander Leon Koole & Thomas A. Pyszczynski (eds.), Handbook of Experimental Existential Psychology, Guilford Press. pp. 263--283. 2004.
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47Political ideologies and their social psychological functionsIn Michael Freeden, Lyman Tower Sargent & Marc Stears (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies, Oxford University Press. pp. 232--250. 2013.
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22Theoretical integration in motivational science: System justification as one of many “autonomous motivational structures”Behavioral and Brain Sciences 37 (2): 146-147. 2014.
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26What's so insidious about “Peace, Love, and Understanding”? A system justification perspectiveBehavioral and Brain Sciences 35 (6): 438-439. 2012.We agree that promoting intergroup harmony system-justifying and identify several ways in which and stereotypes, superordinate identification, intergroup contact, and prejudice reduction techniques can undermine social change motivation by reinforcing system-justifying beliefs. This may but it also prevents individuals and groups from tackling serious social problems, including inequality and oppression
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14The “chicken-and-egg” problem in political neuroscienceBehavioral and Brain Sciences 37 (3): 317-318. 2014.
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58Belief in a just God (and a just society): A system justification perspective on religious ideologyJournal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology 34 (1): 56-81. 2014.
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8Left & Right: The Psychological Significance of a Political DistinctionOxford University Press. 2021.This book brings together for the first time an updated, revised collection of influential essays and articles that capture some of the most exciting scientific and scholarly contributions to the topic of political ideology. John Jost tackles fundamental questions about how psychology, neuroscience, and societal factors impact political attitudes and group divisions. In what sense, if any, are ordinary citizens "ideological"? Is it useful to locate political attitudes on a single dimension of re…Read more
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6A Theory of System JustificationHarvard University Press. 2020.Why do we so often defend the very social systems that are responsible for injustice and exploitation? In A Theory of System Justification, John Jost argues that we are motivated to defend the status quo because doing so serves fundamental psychological needs for certainty, security, and social acceptance. We want to feel good not only about ourselves and the groups to which we belong, but also about the overarching social structure in which we live, even when it hurts others and ourselves. Jost…Read more
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270Moral Realism and the Search for Ideological Truth: A Philosophical-Psychological CollaborationIn Robin Celikates, Sally Haslanger & Jason Stanley (eds.), Analyzing Ideology, Oxford University Press. 2023.Scholars of ideology in social-scientific disciplines, including psychology, sociology, and political science, stand to benefit from taking seriously the philosophical contributions of Professor Peter Railton. This is because Railton provides much-needed conceptual precision—and a rare sense of epistemological and moral clarity—to a topic that is notoriously slippery and prone to relativistic musing and the drawing of false equivalences. In an essay entitled “Morality, Ideology, and Reflection: …Read more
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10According to Silvan Tomkins polarity theory, ideological thought is universally structured by a clash between two opposing worldviews. On the left, a humanistic worldview seeks to uphold the intrinsic value of the person; on the right, a normative worldview holds that human worth is contingent upon conformity to rules. In this article, we situate humanism and normativism within the context of contemporary models of political ideology as a function of motivated social cognition, beliefs about the…Read more
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10Why does the "mental shotgun" fire system-justifying bullets?Behavioral and Brain Sciences 37 (5): 489-489. 2014.We suggest that people privilege explanations relying on inherent rather than contingent factors not only because of an innate cognitive tendency to monitor reality, but because doing so satisfies the desire to perceive the societal status quo as legitimate. In support, we describe experimental studies linking the activation of system justification motivation to the endorsement of inherence-based explanations.
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Neurocognitive correlates of liberalism and conservatismNature Neuroscience 10 (10): 1246-1247. 2007.
Areas of Specialization
Social Psychology |
Philosophy of Social Science |
History of Psychology |
Philosophy of Psychology |