ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that reactions to social groups are nuanced, complex, and differentiated, largely because they are strongly linked to reactions toward overarching social systems. System-level attitudes may be placed on a continuum ranging from paranoiac to suspicious distrust to legitimate trust to Panglossian idealization. System justification theory builds on sociological, organizational, and psychological theories of justification and legitimation to analyze the observed tendency to rationalize social and political systems and to explain and justify the existence of inequality and disadvantage in such systems. Like cognitive dissonance theory, system justification theory addresses the holding of attitudes that are contrary to one's own self-interest and therefore contrary to what one would expect on the basis of psychological theories of self-enhancement or economic theories of rational self-interest. Most situations involving intergroup relations are extremely complex and multifaceted, and most cognitive, affective, and behavioral reactions to social structures and groups are conflicted and ambivalent, because they arise from a multiplicity of contradictory motives.
