Morality and Politics: A System Justification Perspective

An Interview with John Jost by Paul Rosenberg Note: This interview was originally published on Salon.com with an outrageously incendiary title that entirely misrepresented its content. Introduction by Paul Rosenberg: In the immediate aftermath of World War II, a wide range of thinkers, both secular and religious, struggled to make sense of the profound evil of war, particularly Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. One such effort, “The Authoritarian Personality” by Theodore Adorno and three co-authors, opened up a whole new field of political psychology—initially a small niche within the broader field of social psychology—which developed fitfully over the years, but became an increasingly robust subject area in 1980s and 90s, fleshing out a number of distinct areas of cognitive processing in which liberals and conservatives differed from one another. Liberal/conservative differences were not the sole concern of this field, but they did appear repeatedly across a growing range of different sorts of measures, including the inclination to justify the existing social order, whatever it might be, an insight developed by John Jost, starting in the 1990s, under the rubric of “system justification theory.” The field of political psychology gained increased visibility in the 2000s as conservative Republicans controlled the White House and Congress simultaneously for the first time since the Great Depression, and took the nation in an increasingly divisive direction. Most notabl...
Source: The Situationist - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Ideology Morality Situationist Contributors Social Psychology System Legitimacy Source Type: blogs