Affect (Psychology)

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.

Terror Management Theory posits that induced death-related cognitions lead to anxiety. To relieve anxiety, individuals may bolster their self-esteem or current cultural worldviews. The current study hypothesizes that induced thoughts of social connectedness will be an anxiety-buffering mechanism that will reduce the need to defend one's worldview. Participants watched one of two films which were intended to either induce social connectedness or have no effect on the individual. Each participant watched a short film clip then completed measures pertaining to moral transgressions, affiliative and agentic extraversion, self-esteem, and positive and negative affect. Females who were high on affiliation were found to defend their worldviews more often than males high on affiliation following the social connectedness induction. The experimental (42-Up) condition showed lower levels of punitiveness than the control (K-Web) condition.