ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on recent empirical work that sheds new light on the process of system justification by focusing on a particular type of system-justifying belief, namely, naturalistic attributions for societal inequality. According to system justification theory, people are motivated to view the systems under which they work and live as stable, fair, and legitimate. The question of whether members of disadvantaged groups engage in system justification, and to what extent, has been an important focus for system justification theory. This created a 'conflict' between women's group and system justifying motivations, and expected that when this conflict was present women would be higher on essentialist explanations for gender inequality as compared to men, who presumably would not experience this conflict. People who are involuntarily unemployed report lower levels of subjective well-being only to the extent that they reject naturalistic explanations for outcomes.
