Stanford GSB: Stanford Business May 2000

Stanford Business

May 2000, Volume 68, Number 3

Social Psychology
Status Ambivalence Inhibits Change
SOCIAL SCIENTIST John Jost studies the beliefs and ideologies that justify our status in the world, whether it be high or low. In recent research, Jost has merged two longstanding but contradictory theories about how disadvantaged minorities view themselves.

A concept Jost calls "attitudinal ambivalence" explains why members of low-status groups, such as African Americans or women, can be both proud and ashamed of who they are—at the same time. This ambivalence only serves to perpetuate inequality and to prevent people from rejecting stereotypes and taking action against inequality, says Jost.

Social psychology has a long history of examining the effects of being in a disadvantaged minority group. Research in the 1930s and 1940s looked at disadvantaged groups and concluded that society's hatred of these groups necessarily resulted in feelings of inferiority. One well-known piece of research noted that black children in the 1940s found white dolls more attractive than black dolls.

The assumption that disadvantage results in a sense of inferiority persisted until the 1960s, when another theory of intergroup relations, social identity theory, emerged in part to explain the gains made by civil rights movements. Social identity theory stressed the opposite: Low-status groups could retain a positive sense of self by revaluing what society had devalued. Slogans such as "Black is beautiful" stress the idea that people need to feel good about themselves and value their own group.

Under the rubric of system justification theory, Jost combines these two seemingly disparate research traditions—the early self-hatred literature and the later social identity research. Jost, who is an assistant professor of organizational behavior, helps explain how both manifestations of minority group behavior can coexist. He argues that the result is ambivalence—the presence of contradictory but strong positive and negative feelings about one's own group.

In two experiments conducted with Diana Burgess, then director of the School's Behavioral Sciences Laboratory, Jost found that members of low-status groups are likely to have a higher degree of ambivalence than members of high-status groups, and that system-justifying beliefs (that people get what they deserve and that status hierarchies are inevitable) increase that ambivalence. This has important negative consequences, because it means that minorities may fail to support other members of their own group. For example, if a woman boss feels ambivalent because she has a strong system justification tendency, that means she might be harder on female employees who make a mistake or otherwise exhibit a negative characteristic than on male subordinates who show lackluster performance.

"Ambivalence makes it harder for us to reduce inequality in organizations, because to some degree we are psychologically justifying and internalizing that inequality," says Jost. "This is the essence of system justification theory."

The corporate implications of Jost's research are profound. Ambivalence inhibits social, cognitive, and organizational change. The more ambivalent people feel, the less capable they are of taking clear and direct action directed at change. Furthermore, if people are ambivalent about members of their own group, research suggests that they will exhibit "response amplification." This means that they will evaluate positive members of their group in extremely favorable terms, but they will be equally hard on in-group members who are perceived as flawed in any way.

BARBARA BUELL

"Attitudinal Ambivalence and the Conflict Between Group and System Justification Motives in Low-Status Groups," John Jost and Diana Burgess, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (Vol. 26, No. 3), March 2000

If people view members of their group in extremely favorable terms, they will be equally hard on members perceived as flawed.