jost_j_t_kay_a_c_thorisdottir_n_social_and_psychological_bas

cannot be taken as evidence for the harmful effects of system justification on the poor. It is possible that the correlation would be even steeper for those who do not believe they are part of a stable and legitimate moral order. Modernization involves a decline in the importance of community, authority, and sacredness, and a corresponding rise in individualism and contractualism. This pattern of changes brings many benefits, but it has also been linked to an increase in depression and suicide. Eckersley and Dear (2002, p. 1892), in analyzing these increases, suggest that “modern Western culture may be failing to do well what cultures do: provide a web or matrix of stories, beliefs, and values that holds a society together, allows individuals to make sense of their lives and sustains them through the trouble and strife of mortal existence.” On this Durkheimian view, the motive to justify socially shared systems begins to seem as fundamental as the motive to tell and retell culturally shared stories or to search collectively for meaning in misfortune. People often want to understand their lives in a social context, and that context is normatively saturated—it has clear dimensions of good and bad, right and wrong. A reflexive or unconscious tendency to find virtue in one’s nation or group may indeed make individuals feel better, but it misses the collective aspects of morality to say that people seek out such virtue in order to reduce their own discomforts.

Benefi t 2: The Origins of the System-Justifying Motive

Jost and Hunyady (2002) suggest that “there is a socially acquired motive to justify and rationalize the existing social system” (p. 148, emphasis added). This claim is echoed by Jost, Banaji, and Nosek (2004), who oppose the idea that “hierarchy and inequality are genetically mandated at the individual or species level” (p. 912), but do allow for the speculative “possibility that human beings have developed generally adaptive capacities to accommodate, internalize, and even rationalize key features of their socially constructed environments” (p. 912). In our analysis, however, a five-foundation morality should be seen as the human default (Rozin, 2007). Community, authority, and sacredness are key ideas in sociology because they are so prevalent cross-culturally and historically. Cultures and subcultures depart from defaults in hundreds of ways, and these departures must be explained by social scientists: Why exactly did Western nations develop novel and less binding moralities in just a few hundred years?

It is notoriously difficult to determine whether human needs and abilities are entirely learned or are partially innate (“organized in advance of experience”). But it can be done. We suggest that the situation is much like the old question about why children cling to their mothers. Harry Harlow’s famous wire-mother/cloth-mother experiments (Harlow & Zimmerman,

1959) demonstrated that the need for contact comfort was innate and was part of a larger and more complex attachment system that could only be understood as an evolutionary adaptation. It was not a by-product of other processes, as Freudians and Behaviorists had argued. We think the same is true here. We suggest that human beings are by default Durkheimians who want to live in a thick social world full of shared meanings, symbols, traditions, and communal goals. These are basic human needs, not products of social learning or unconscious conflict resolution. These needs emerge from the “first draft” of human nature, although the draft is modifiable, as when a child grows up in an anti-authoritarian subculture in which inequality and oppression are frequently discussed and condemned. To test this claim, we might examine the development of children’s play groups and social structures to see whether hierarchy and displays of deference emerge at similar ages across cultures (especially in modern versus more traditional cultures), and with similar ethologies (e.g., subordinates averting gaze, making themselves smaller, and showing other signs of appeasement upward; Fessler, 1999; Keltner & Buswell, 1997).

The system justification motive may have been shaped by the same adaptive considerations as group justification—namely, both served to bind small communities together in the face of cross-group competition, promoting group cohesion while providing anxiety-reducing shared meanings. For high-status groups, group justification and system justification are generally identical in their consequences and effects, but the two motivations are sometimes opposed for low-status groups ( Jost & Hunyady, 2002). It seems possible that group justification and system justification came into conflict only with the advent of very large multigroup systems, a development quite recent in our evolutionary history.

Benefi t 3: Making Sense of Conservatives

In their reply to Greenberg and Jonas (2003), Jost and colleagues (2003b) raised a puzzle about the variety and apparent contradiction of policies that American conservatives support:

We now take it for granted in the United States that political conservatives tend to be for law and order but not gun control, against welfare but generous to corporations, protective of cultural traditions but antagonistic toward contemporary art and music, and wary of government but eager to weaken the separation of church and state. They are committed to freedom and individualism but perennially opposed to extending rights and liberties to disadvantaged minorities, especially gay men and lesbians and others who blur traditional boundaries. There is no obvious political thread that runs through these diverse positions (or through their liberal counterparts) and no logical principle that renders them all consistent. (p. 391)

Jost and colleagues suggest that, instead of a political thread or logical principle, two psychological principles unify conservative positions: resistance to change and acceptance of inequality. We are persuaded by Jost and colleagues’ (2003a) meta-analysis that these two principles are the most concise way to capture the main axis of political ideology using the language of psychological traits. However, this kind of description roots conservatism in traits that are unattractive (e.g., rigid, dogmatic, authoritarian, afraid of change and ambiguity) and immoral from a two-foundation perspective (e.g., preferring inequality to equality). When conservatism is seen as the product of amoral and immoral needs, then system justification is seen as one of the amoral and immoral processes by which these needs are satisfied (see Jost et al., 2003a, Figure 1). This is one description of conservatism, but is it the most fair and accurate?

If anthropologists were studying American social conservatives as a culture, they would try to offer a “thicker” description, one that first tried to empathize rather than reduce, one that offered an account of “what the devil they think they are up to” (Geertz, 1973). MFT grew out of anthropological work on cultural variation in morality (e.g., Shweder et al., 1997), and it can be used to derive a very different solution to the puzzle raised by Jost and colleagues (2003b). We agree that conservative positions seem contradictory to those with a modern or individualizing morality, but we believe they become coherent and consistent once grounded in the three traditional foundations of ingroup, authority, and purity. In Table 15.1 we have laid out the apparent paradoxes of American conservatism raised by Jost and colleagues (2003b). For anyone with a modern (two-foundation) morality, the positions in the left-hand column are obviously better—they are closely connected to virtues and concerns related to harm and fairness. The positions taken by conservatives therefore seem immoral, and so they cry out for a psychological explanation. What motives could lead a person to support these positions? How about protecting oneself from psychological threats and uncertainty?

But if you grant that many people—or, at least, most American social conservatives—have a five-foundation morality, then the puzzle is solved in a different way. Social conservatives make appeals to fairness and harm too, but most of the positions they take on culture war issues are coherent because, as shown in Table 15.1, they are attempts to reinvigorate community (versus Gesellschaft and big government), authority (versus anarchy and anomie), and sacredness (versus profanity). The moral foundations of ingroup, authority, and purity are therefore central to social conservatism, just as they are to system justification.

The system-justifying impulse is therefore a part of normal or default human morality. It reflects a widespread human tendency to believe that the

existing social order is morally good, regardless of how that order treats us. Recognizing the system-justifying motive’s basis in the traditional foundations of morality can help us better understand the tenacity of the motive, and perhaps help us prevent some of its detrimental effects for low-status group members.

CONCLUSION

In James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the novel’s hero Stephen Dedalus gives voice to Western modernity’s veneration of individual freedom: “When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets” ( Joyce, 1916/1991, p. 206). In this worldview, language (ingroup), nationality (authority and ingroup), and religion (purity, authority, and ingroup) are not sacred at all; they are profane “nets” the individual soul must fly past to be free. This is a powerful expression of modern morality and what it holds sacred: the individual, freed from the oppressive bonds of community, authority, and religious sanctity.

In this essay, however, we have offered an account of traditional and conservative moralities in which ingroup, authority, and purity are not necessarily nets to trap and kill the human spirit; rather, they are foundations upon which some cultures build the structures that give lives order, value, and meaning. Our goal in offering this descriptive account is not to claim that conservative morality is superior to liberal morality, normatively speaking. Our normative position is a kind of consequentialism—we think moral systems should be judged by the quality of the worlds they lead to. We believe the benefits of modernity have been enormous, and that it is neither possible nor desirable to reduce ethnic diversity, eliminate existing technologies, or otherwise return to the Gemeinschaft social systems that prevailed centuries ago.

But our consequentialism leads us to ask whether there might be some hidden utility in the three traditional foundations. Even from a liberal perspective, in which all that matters is the welfare of individuals (particularly those who are least well off), might there be some paradoxical benefits to individuals of social policies that do not put the welfare of individuals first? The social policies favored by conservatives, shown in the right-hand column of Table 15.1, are, broadly speaking, Durkheimian policies. They increase the cohesion and stability of communities. They therefore also increase the social capital (Coleman, 1988) of communities, which includes the dense networks of obligation and trust, social information channels, and effective norms and sanctions for deviance. By extension, we might say they increase the symbolic capital, too—the culturally evolved network of shared symbols and

meanings from which people construct their identities and make sense of their worlds. (See Appiah, 2005, on the challenges of identity construction for liberalism.) Given the many arguments from psychology and sociology about the costs of anomie and hyperindividualism (Bellah et al., 1985; Leary, 2004; Schwartz, 1986), and the benefits of close, enduring social bonds and shared meanings (Baumeister & Leary, 1995), we believe that a modern society that makes some use of the three traditional foundations might—at least in theory—be a more humane, healthy, and satisfying place overall than a society that builds its values and policies exclusively on the first two foundations. We are not confident that the traditional foundations offer such benefits in practice, but we believe that traditional and conservative ideas are frequently mischaracterized, prematurely dismissed, or simply ignored by many psychologists, philosophers, and other academics.

In conclusion, we do indeed live on Planet Durkheim, where community, authority, and sacredness are foundations of morality. Or, at least, many Earthlings live on such a planet, so those of us who study morality, ideology, and system justification can benefit from conducting open-minded crossplanetary fieldwork.

Author Note

We thank David Harsdorf, Steven Hitlin, John Jost, Selin Kesebir, Heidi Maibom, Jamie Mayerfeld, Brian Nosek, Deborah Prentice, Kate Ranganath, Gary Sherman, Peter Singer, and Colin Tucker Smith for helpful comments on earlier drafts. Haidt thanks the Princeton University Center for Human Values for providing the time, support, and criticism needed to write this paper. Please address comments to haidt@virginia.edu or to jgraham@ virginia.edu.

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