Author Type

Graduate Student

Date of Award

2008

Document Type

Thesis

Publication Status

Version of Record

Submission Date

October 2026

Abstract

System justification theorists have proposed that people will defend one's circumstances, even if they inflict psychological and material costs. This tendency has been found to extend even to outcomes that have not yet been decided, but are perceived as being likely; however, this research has only examined outcomes that will be decided on in the near future. According to Construal Level Theory (CLT), distant future events are represented primarily according to their essential features, while thoughts about temporally near events are more concrete and contextual. We hypothesized that system justification results from the motivational impact of low-level thinking, and so would be expected to occur for near-future, but not distant-future, outcomes. Consistent with our hypothesis, our Main Study found evidence of system justification only when outcomes were to be decided in the near future. Distant future outcomes, in contrast, were viewed as being more undesirable as they became increasingly likely.

Extent

vi, 65 p. : ill.

Comments

by Nicholas J. Martens.|Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2008.|Includes bibliography.|Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2008. Mode of access: World Wide Web.|by Nicholas J. Martens.

Identifier

FADT186299

Format

pdf

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