+Economic Justification
Jost & Thompson (2000)
Topic: Fairness, Equity, & Political Beliefs
Instructions:
Participants were asked to rate their agreement with the following items on a scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 9 (strongly agree).
Response Options:
- Strongly disagree - 9. Strongly agree
Items:
- If people work hard, they almost always get what they want
- There are many reasons to think that the economic system is unfair (*R)
- Poor people are not essentially different from rich people (*R)
- Most people who don't get ahead in our society should not blame the system; they have only themselves to blame
- Social class differences reflect differences in the natural order of things
- Economic differences in the society reflect an illegitimate distribution of resources (*R)
- Economic positions are legitimate reflections of people's achievements
- It is unfair to have an economic system which produces extreme wealth and extreme poverty at the same time (*R)
- There are no inherent differences between rich and poor; it is purely a matter of the circumstances into which you are born.
Notes: Used by Stephens et al. (2014)
Citation:
Jost, J. T., & Thompson, E. P. (2000). Group-Based Dominance and Opposition to Equality as Independent Predictors of Self-Esteem, Ethnocentrism, and Social Policy Attitudes among African Americans and European Americans. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 36(3), 209–232. https://doi.org/10.1006/jesp.1999.1403
Links to an external site.
Link to PDF:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3059499/pdf/nihms243742.pdf Links to an external site.