| In recent years,the GDP of China has experienced a steady and rapid growth.But at the same time,China’s wealth gap continues to grow and the situation of social class immobility is becoming more and more serious.Under such a social background,it is necessary for us to find out the attitude of people who live in this society toward the ongoing social system and its mechanism.For decades,several important conclusions have been found,but the consensus hasn’t been reached yet.As an influential social psychology theory in this domain,system justification theory has brought out that lower class individuals’ system-justifying beliefs are higher than those from higher class.In other words,lower class individuals are more likely to view social system as legitimate than those from higher class.This statement is called class-legitimacy hypothesis.However,the opposite pattern emerged in many empirical studies suggesting that system-justifying beliefs are stronger among individuals from higher class compare to lower class counterparts.Apart from the total effect of class on system-justifying beliefs,the mechanism between class and system-justifying beliefs is also unclear.In order to shed light on this problem,based on the latest literature,the present research provided two potential psychological pathways,and carried out four aspects of researches(including a total of 9 specific studies)to test the effect and mechanism that class predicts system-justifying beliefs.Study 1 and study 2 focused on the total effect that class predicted system-justifying beliefs.In other words,the purpose of the two studies is to examine class-legitimacy hypothesis based on Chinese samples.Study 1 used the data of Chinese General Social Survey,or CGSS.Study 2 tested the influence of social class on system-justifying beliefs by manipulating subjective class.Both studies showed that lower class individuals owned lower levels of system-justifying beliefs.Study 3 and study 4 was aimed to reveal the attribution mechanism that class predicted system-justifying beliefs.Specifically,the two studies explored whether class could predict system-justifying beliefs via perceived control and internal attribution for the rich-poor gap.Study 3 and study 4 were both conducted by correlational method,but their samples were different.The results exhibited that there is serial mediation effect between social class,perceived control,internal attribution for the rich-poor gap and system-justifying beliefs.Lower class individuals had less perceived control,leading them more likely to attribute the rich-poor gap to internal factors,and based on which,their system-justifying beliefs were relatively low.The results could be seen as a positive relation between class and system-justifying beliefs via perceived control.The next 4 studies revealed another mechanism by which perceived control predicted system-justifying beliefs.That is compensatory pathway.According to compensatory control theory,lower perceived control leads to high inclination of need for structure.However,the present study argued that only under a high level of perceptions of class mobility could individuals who need for structure see the system as legitimate,for only under perceptions of class mobility could individuals understand the system as orderly.Therefore,the present study hypothesized that perceptions of class mobility could moderate the effect that need for structure predicted system-justifying beliefs,and further,moderate the effect that perceived control predicted system-justifying beliefs.Study 5 to study 8 were designed to test the hypothesis.Study 5 showed that perceptions of class mobility did bring individuals with a sense of order.Based on experimental data,study 6 and study 7 found that perceptions of class mobility moderated the relationship between perceived control and system-justifying beliefs.Under the condition of lower mobility perceptions,perceived control positively predicted system-justifying beliefs;under higher mobility perceptions,however,there’s no correlation between perceived control and system-justifying beliefs.In addition,study 8 revealed the entire mechanism of compensatory pathway by constructing a mediated moderation model:those with low perceived control were inclined to need more structures.If their mobility perceptions were relatively low,then the level of need for structure of them had nothing to do with their system-justifying beliefs.If their mobility perceptions were relatively high,however,the level of need for structure of them could positively predict their system-justifying beliefs.At last,study 9 used a sample of 593 non-student adults to investigated the comprehensive model of how social class influence system-justifying beliefs.This mode combined the attributional and compensatory pathway mentioned above and considered boundary condition as well.Taking attributional and compensatory pathways together,the entire mechanism that class predicted system-justifying beliefs could be described as follows according to the present results.Firstly,class positively predicted perceived control.Secondly,the effect that perceived control predicted system-justifying beliefs included both attributional and compensatory pathways,as well as the moderating effect of class mobility perceptions.Considering the moderating effect of the model,when mobility perceptions were relatively low,only the mediating role of attributional pathway worked and compensatory pathway was not significant,leading to a positively predicting effect of perceived control on system-justifying beliefs via internal attribution for the rich-poor gap.When mobility perceptions were relatively high,both attributional and compensatory pathways existed,but their effects were opposite.The indirect effect of attributional pathway is positive while indirect effect of compensatory pathway is negative.As a consequence,the two effects worked against each other,leaving an insignificant relationship between perceived control and system-justifying beliefs.At last,the total effect of class predicting system-justifying beliefs was positive and significant,which didn’t support the argument of class-legitimacy hypothesis.The results of this study have some implications for related research fields.Firstly,the present research used Chinese samples,and found that class-legitimacy hypothesis was not exists among Chinese,which raised a problem of the cross-cultural universality of class-legitimacy hypothesis.Besides,the study integrated the traditional compensatory perspectives of system justification theory and the newly proposed attributional perspectives.This co-existing model of the two pathways was more comprehensive than previous model.Last but not least,for the statement that lower control motivated higher system-justifying beliefs,the present results showed that this effect was moderated by class mobility beliefs.The finding has significance on both compensatory control theory and social governing practice.For lower class individuals,whose perceived control are relatively weak,only when they feel that the mobility of social class is possible,they will enhance the endorsement of the existing social system.Based on this finding,the present results point out that improving social mobility is essential to social stability. |
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