Four Psychological Reasons for Why We Defend and Contribute to a Clearly Self-Destructive Political System — Explaining Why the Worse Things Get, the Harder It Seems to Change Them

© 2011 Peter Free

 

14 December 2011

 

 

Rationality is not one of humanity’s strengths, and that explains a lot about where America is today

 

Two psychologists think they know why people defend the very “systems” that are destroying them.

 

I raise their ideas because I have been increasingly interested in the decline of political discourse in America into a realm characterized by inanity, empty-headed passion slinging, and generalized fact-avoidance.

 

It’s as if all our leaders have lost their minds — and most of us, ours.  And, as the situation gets worse and more self-defeating, we engage in abrasively more of the same.

 

 

First, a proposition

 

We humans tend not to think clearly.

 

See, for example, Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011) (hardcover, Kindle, and Nook).

 

In fact, I would go so far as to say many people don’t think at all — if “thought” is meant to describe a rational analysis based on facts, linked evidence, and clearly delineated assumptions.

 

 

Second, why we defend failing systems

 

Defending a way of doing things that is clearly going to be the “death” of us seems a strange thing to do.

 

Yet, Americans are doing exactly that, as we watch and continue to contribute to the freak-show politics that are wrecking most everybody’s chances for productive personal and national futures.

 

Enter psychologists Aaron Kay and Justin Friesen.  They think they know why people continue to defend the social and economic systems that are figuratively killing them:

 

More than a decade of research from the perspective of system-justification theory . . . has demonstrated that people engage in motivated psychological processes that bolster and support the status quo.

 

We propose that this motive is highly contextual: People do not justify their social systems at all times but are more likely to do so under certain circumstances.

 

We describe four contexts in which people are prone to engage in system-justifying processes: (a) system threat, (b) system dependence, (c) system inescapability, and (d) low personal control.

 

We describe how and why, in these contexts, people who wish to promote social change might expect resistance.

 

© 2011 Aaron C. Kay and Justin Frieseman, On Social Stability and Social Change: Understanding When System Justification Does and Does Not Occur, Current Directions in Psychological Science 20(6): 360-364 (December 2011) (from the abstract, paragraph split)

 

 

Look carefully at Kay-Frieseman’s list of reasons for people engaging in reality-avoiding behavior

 

Aren’t we Americans today:

 

(i) dependent on our political/governance system,

 

(ii) inescapably trapped in its workings,

 

and

 

(iii) can’t seem to affect the process or its outcomes in any discernible way?

 

Can you think of a better way to describe the current state of citizens’ relationships with the American political process?

 

 

Now, throw in Kay-Friesen’s “system threat”

 

Wouldn’t a “system threat” in today’s American context be any idea that challenged the (mostly unexamined) principles of our past?

 

Like the virtues of unregulated capitalism, unconstrained free markets, and unadulterated individualism.

 

The more intensely that our political and economic systems prove the unworkability of these mostly thoughtless bastions from our past, the more furiously we defend their rightness.

 

 

Describing the surprising dysfunctional-ness of the Kay-Friesen phenomenon

 

The virulence of the dysfunction-supporting psychological trait on our part is (perhaps) astonishing:

 

Why do we stick up for a system or institution we live in—a government, company, or marriage—even when anyone else can see it is failing miserably?

 

Why do we resist change even when the system is corrupt or unjust?

 

System justification isn’t the same as acquiescence, explains Aaron C. Kay . . .

 

“It’s pro-active. When someone comes to justify the status quo, they also come to see it as what should be.”

 

© 2011 Divya Menon, Why Do People Defend Unjust, Inept, and Corrupt Systems?, Association for Psychological Science (12 December 2011) (paragraph split)

 

In other words, we don’t just say, “It’s okay that you have a gun to my head” — we add, “Here, let me help you pull the trigger.”

 

 

The moral? — Our worst enemy is our irrational brain

 

If we can’t guard against our tendency to justify and actively contribute to self-destructive social and economic systems, we are doomed as a genuinely democratic nation.