Martens, Nicholas J.

System justification theorists have proposed that people are motivated to view their political, economic, and social circumstances as desirable, necessary, and fair (e.g., Jost, Nosek & Banaji, 2004). Despite more than 15 years of system justification research, the meaning of fairness within this context has not been investigated directly. Over the past several decades three major criteria have been identified as contributing to people's perceptions of fairness: distributive justice, procedural justice, and one's own idiosyncratic set of personal values. Focusing on the last two, we reasoned that values are represented more abstractly than is information about procedural fairness, and that the relative weight of values versus procedures should increase at higher levels of mental construal. Whereas information about procedures is often seen as providing a basis for the acceptance of undesirable outcomes, judgments based on personal conceptions of right and wrong are considered to be independent from "establishment, convention, rules, or authority" (Skitka & Mullen, 2008, p. 531), and are therefore unlikely to be used in a motivated defense of the status quo. We therefore hypothesized that system justification would be most likely to occur in conditions where procedures are most salient (i.e., at low levels of construal). However, despite using manipulations of the system justification motive that have previously been successful, and working with issues similar to those used in previous work, we were unable to produce the typical system justification pattern of results. Possible reasons for this are discussed.

System justification theorists have proposed that people will defend one's circumstances, even if they inflict psychological and material costs. This tendency has been found to extend even to outcomes that have not yet been decided, but are perceived as being likely; however, this research has only examined outcomes that will be decided on in the near future. According to Construal Level Theory (CLT), distant future events are represented primarily according to their essential features, while thoughts about temporally near events are more concrete and contextual. We hypothesized that system justification results from the motivational impact of low-level thinking, and so would be expected to occur for near-future, but not distant-future, outcomes. Consistent with our hypothesis, our Main Study found evidence of system justification only when outcomes were to be decided in the near future. Distant future outcomes, in contrast, were viewed as being more undesirable as they became increasingly likely.