Low-income workers rationalize their own economic disadvantage to cope with inequality.

Evidence

In Reading 12, Robert Lane takes a motivational approach, concluding on the basis of structured interviews with relatively low-income blue-collar workers that disadvantageous economic inequality is personally threatening, especially in a society in which self-worth is linked to the amount of money that one earns. In order to live with the situation of inequality, Lane argued that people rationalize their own state of disadvantage, an assumption also made by system justification theorists (Jost & Banaji, 1994; Kay, Jimenez, & Jost, 2002). — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 128

Categorization

• XREF: Directly anticipates the system justification theory developed by Jost — foundational for this textbook’s own authorial framework. — connects to: Economic inequality is the universal form that local oppressions take. — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 337
• ADDENDUM: Speaks to the sacrificial-loyalty theme: why the disadvantaged defend the very system that disadvantages them.