Prejudice victims can unknowingly justify the system that disadvantages them

Evidence

A recently identified problem for prejudice victims stems from false consciousness – the idea that one may hold a complex set of beliefs that are both false and contrary to one’s social interest. In general, these beliefs justify a system of inequality in which victims find themselves (see Jackman and Jost & Hamilton, chs. 6 and 13 this volume). The net result is that actions based on such beliefs further one’s disadvantaged position in society. System justification is characterized by psychological tendencies that include failure to perceive injustice and disadvantage, justification of social roles, false attribution of blame, identification with the oppressor, and resistance to change. System justification helps to explain negative self-stereotyping by disadvantaged group members and implicates an unwitting complicity of victims in their victimization. — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 1071

Categorization

• DEFINE: Provides a crisp definition of system justification and its component psychological tendencies, enumerating the specific mechanisms.
• DEEPTHINKING: The ‘unwitting complicity of victims in their victimization’ framework — blame shifted onto the oppressed through their own beliefs — is a dense, paradigm-shifting construction of how inequality reproduces itself without coercion.
• BMF: This evokes the psychological autonomy-surrender in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s ‘We’ — the State’s citizens wholeheartedly justifying their own oppression through internalized doctrine rather than resisting it, an oblique cross-domain resonance.