John Jost

We used supervised machine-learning techniques to examine ideological asymmetries in online rumor transmission. Although liberals were more likely than conservatives to communicate in general about the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings (Study 1, N = 26,422) and 2020 death of the sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein (Study 2, N = 141,670), conservatives were more likely to share rumors. Rumor-spreading decreased among liberals following official correction, but it increased among conservatives. Marathon rumors were spread twice as often by conservatives pre-correction, and nearly 10 times more often post-correction. Epstein rumors were spread twice as often by conservatives pre-correction, and nearly, eight times more often post-correction. With respect to ideologically congenial rumors, conservatives circulated the rumor that the Clinton family was involved in Epstein’s death 18.6 times more often than liberals …

Effectively reducing climate change requires marked, global behavior change. However, it is unclear which strategies are most likely to motivate people to change their climate beliefs and behaviors. Here, we tested 11 expert-crowdsourced interventions on four climate mitigation outcomes: beliefs, policy support, information sharing intention, and an effortful tree-planting behavioral task. Across 59,440 participants from 63 countries, the interventions’ effectiveness was small, largely limited to nonclimate skeptics, and differed across outcomes: Beliefs were strengthened mostly by decreasing psychological distance (by 2.3%), policy support by writing a letter to a future-generation member (2.6%), information sharing by negative emotion induction (12.1%), and no intervention increased the more effortful behavior—several interventions even reduced tree planting. Last, the effects of each intervention differed depending …

Populism, as a general belief system, is thought to combine an idealistic view of “the people,” a cynical view of “the elites” as hopelessly corrupt, and a Manichean conception of “good” versus “evil.” Understood in this way, it stands to reason that certain psychological variables would predict the endorsement of populist attitudes, even after adjusting for demographic factors. Studies show that authoritarianism, conscientiousness, and openness are positively associated with support for populism in general, whereas system justification, agreeableness, and neuroticism are negatively associated with support for populism in general. In contexts as diverse as France, Germany, and the UK, we find that system justification, conceptualized as a motivation to defend and bolster the societal status quo, is associated with decreased support for populist parties on the right and left—even for respondents who are high in economic …

In the U.S. and other Western nations, one demographic group is most likely to downplay anthropogenic climate change and its consequences, to embrace the “discourse of delay,” and to resist pro‐environmental policies: conservative white men. In this article, we bring together critical, feminist perspectives on masculinity and environmental dominance and social psychological insights from system justification theory to hypothesize that identity‐protective cognition, material interests, and ideological legitimation processes combine and reinforce one another to motivate obstructionism when it comes to taking climate action. Our hope is that by integrating critical and empirical approaches to social science—and illuminating individual and group psychological factors that are embedded in specific historical and political settings—it will be possible to increase solidarity among environmental scholars and activists and …

This article critically assesses the role of measurement invariance techniques in cross-cultural research. Despite growing awareness of the need for cross-cultural equivalence in psychological scales, tension exists between proponents of measurement invariance and practitioners who may find recommended standards overly strict and impractical. We begin by recounting the historical origins of measurement invariance techniques, which were developed to ensure culture-fair assessments amid controversies over comparative studies of intelligence. We then compare the philosophical assumptions of psychometrics with those of neighboring fields in cross-cultural research with respect to ontology, epistemology, and methodology. Through a simulation and empirical data, we contend that while measurement invariance is important for scales that assess individual differences, it is potentially problematic when it comes to investigating social constructs that are shared within but differ between cultures. Study 1 reveals intrinsic characteristics of multigroup comparisons with closed-ended scales that predispose multigroup confirmatory factor analysis to violations of measurement invariance. Study 2 takes the General System Justification Scale as an example and demonstrates external validity with structural indicators of social mobility and societal well-being, despite not meeting measurement invariance standards. We conclude that strict adherence to measurement invariance is not necessary to draw meaningful cross-cultural comparisons. Instead, we propose an alternative approach that prioritizes external validity and exploratory analyses. We …

In this editorial, the Founding Field Chief Editor of Frontiers in Social Psychology expresses several ideas about the past, present, and possible future of social psychology, seeking to explain we need social psychology, why we need a new journal in social psychology, and what kind of journal in social psychology we need. The Editor argues for a rich, humanistic, interdisciplinary, philosophically informed social psychology devoted to addressing social problems in the illustrious traditions of John Dewey, Kurt Lewin, Gordon Allport, Muzafer Sherif, Solomon Asch, Morton Deutsch, and others. He suggests that disciplinary “crises” of practicality, historicity, and replicability may be more interconnected than is generally recognized. The Editor advocates a non-hubristic, theory-driven, multi-leveled analysis of human behavior that attends to both subjective and objective aspects of social, cultural, economic, and political contexts. Editorial priorities of the new journal include scientific rigor, social relevance, and intellectual humility.

This article rebuts arguments made by proponents of the Social Identity Model of Social Attitudes (SIMSA), especially the claim that needs for accuracy and a positively distinct social identity are sufficient to explain system justification by members of disadvantaged groups. There are many serious conceptual and empirical problems with SIMSA: (1) It treats system justification as the outcome of neutral, non-ideological processes, adopting a relativistic position about social injustice; (2) It conflates completely different concepts, such as (a) holding beliefs that favour an out-group vs. believing that one is a member of that group, and (b) recognising that status differences exist vs. believing that those differences are legitimate; (3) It is fatalistic, implying that it would be “socially inaccurate and maladaptive” for the disadvantaged to challenge “social reality” by protesting against the status quo; (4) It fails to explain individual …

Supplementary materials to: Hoffarth, M. R., Liaquat, U., & Jost, J. T. (2023). Heterosexist system justification: Identity and ideology explain variability in sexual minorities’ opposition to homophobia and support for LGBTQ+ rights. Journal of Social and Political Psychology, 11(2). https://doi.org/10.5964/jspp.11515