John T. Jost
Department of Psychology
Yale University
New Haven, CT 06520 - 8205
The concept offalse consciousness is reviewed from a historical perspective and discussed in light of recenttheoretical advances in socialist andfeminist political philosophy. False consciousness is defined as the holding offlilse beliefs that are contrary to one's social interest and which thereby contribute to the disadvantaged position of the self orthe group. It is argued that considerable psychological evidenceforfalse consciousness exists and that a thorough understanding of the phenomenon integrates several lines of research on the problem ofpolitical acquiescence. Six basic types offalse consciousness are proposed: (I) Failure to perceive injustice and disadvantage, (2) Fatalism, (3) Justfication of social roles, (4) False attribution of blame, (5) Identification with the oppressor, and (6) Resistance to change. Because the concept offalse consciousness is likely to arouse suspicion because of its Marxian origins, several theoretical and methodological objections to the scientWc study offalse consciousness are raised and addressed.
KEY WORDS: ideology, false consciousness, political psychology, system justification, political acquiescence, group consciousness-raising, feminism, analytical Marxism
Is there not an inconsistency when I attribute illusions both tofeatures of the situation and to the cognitive apparatus of the subject? In the Marxist theory of ideologies class position is central, but in cognitive psychology the stress is laid on the internal psychic mechanism of the subject, and so it might seem strange to seek in the latter micro-foundations for the former. This, however, is an artificial opposition. For illusions to occur both the external situation and the internal processing must come into play. - J. Elster (1982, p. 137)
The purpose of this paper is to define the concept of false consciousness and to review some psychological evidence for its operation. The evidence is organized in terms of a preliminary taxonomy for the study of false consciousness. It is suggested that false consciousness is a neglected but potentially important topic for social and political psychology, drawing together previously unrelated lines of work on the problem of political acquiescence. Most Marxian contributions to the study of psychology have tended to be negative in form, that is, critical of paradigmatic psychological science without offering empirical data for an alternative theoretical perspective (Billig, 1982; Brown, 1974; Plon, 1974; Sampson, 1983; Wexler, 1983), and the same can be said of most feminist critiques of mainstream psychology (Fine, 1992; Hare-Mustin & Marecek, 1988; Riger, 1992). While many of these critical contributions are quite useful, my analysis of false consciousness seeks also to highlight the positive contributions that an empirical psychology can make when it is informed by Marxian and feminist social theory. 'Marxian' social theory is defined as that which is influenced by the method and content of Marx's work and the work of his followers without necessarily adhering to the theory or practice of orthodox Marxism; it reflects, in other words, "a non-dogmatic approach to Marxism" (Roemer, 1986, p. 2).
A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE CONCEPT OF FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS
While Marx and Engels (1846) wrote informally about the problem of false consciousness in their early work on ideology, they did not do much to develop it (Lewy, 1982; Wood, 1988). The concept was used to describe the effects of ideological domination. It was suggested that through institutional control over education, religion, media, culture, and economic systems, dominant groups in society were capable of spreading ideas which serve to justify inequalities of status and power (see Carragee, 1993, for a recent discussion). A consequence of this hypothesis is that those ideas which favor dominant groups tend to prevail in society. Thus, Marx and Engels (1846) wrote that "The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production" (p. 64). Cognition, on this view, is always subject to large-scale social, economic, and political forces such as the domination of some groups by others (cf. Shaw, 1989). The political consciousness of disadvantaged peoples was theorized to be "false" to some degree, that is, reflective of the dominant group's interests rather than their own interests. Marx and Engels argued that in history people "have constantly made up for themselves false conceptions about themselves, about what they are and what they ought to be," and the call was sounded to "liberate them from the chimeras, the ideas, the dogmas, the imaginary beings under the yoke of which they are pining away" (1846, p. 37).
At the same time, however, Marx's later views may have been too optimistic about the abilities of oppressed people to recognize and take action against the sources of their oppression. By predicting that subordinate groups in society would soon recognize the illegitimacy of their subordination and rise up to overthrow the system, Marx may have underestimated the extent to which social-psychological mechanisms allow people to adapt to political systems which thwart their own interests. Thus, the concept of "false consciousness" was developed more fully only later by socialist scholars seeking to explain, in part, why revolution was not forthcoming (see Gabel, 1975; Gramsci, 1971; Lukács, 1971; Marcuse, 1964; Meyerson, 1991).
In recent years, the study of false consciousness has been revitalized by the fruits of conceptual analysis and feminist theory. Analytic philosophers such as Cohen (1978), Eagleton (1991), Elster (1985), Miller (1984), Roemer (1986), Wood (1988), and many others have applied their conceptual rigor to the concepts of Marxism, which had formerly been criticized for their lack of precision and unfalsifiability (Lewy, 1982). As a result, Marxian accounts of ideology and false consciousness have attained new standards of clarity and utility in recent philosophical work (Cunningham, 1987; Eagleton, 1991; Meyerson, 1991; Wood, 1988). The analytical approach also makes explicit connections to sociological and psychological phenomena such as biased or heuristical thinking, defection in the prisoner's dilemma situation, and the expression of "class consciousness" (see Elster, 1982, 1985; Levine, Sober, & Wright, 1992; Wright, 1985), providing a philosophical basis for the social-psychological study of false consciousness. It is argued that "Marxism should, without embarrassment, subject itself to the conventional standards of social science and analytical philosophy" (Levine et al., 1992, p. 5). The guiding assumptions of "analytical Marxism," that propositions derived from Marx's method should be subjected to empirical confrontation and that complete explanations should make referencetQ psychological states of individual actors (Elster, 1985; Roemer, 1986), bring the work of Marx closer to contemporary social and political psychology than ever before.
Feminist scholars have invoked false consciousness in order to understand theoretical and practical problems concerning the psychological effects of rape, incest, domestic violence, and pornography. In particular, they have attempted to explain why it is so difficult for victims of sexual and physical abuse to terminate abusive relationships and to avoid blaming themselves for the abuse (Collins, 1991; Fine, 1992; MacKinnon, 1989) and why women as a group seem relatively unaware of their status as an oppressed group (Crosby, 1982; Dworkin, 1983; Gurin, 1985). The ways in which girls and women are socialized to reject their own "natural" responses to events involving sexism and inequality and to adopt instead the norms of a patriarchal society have become research topics for feminist social science (Brown & Gilligan, 1992). A primary goal of feminist politics, therefore, is to awaken (or reawaken) a sense of self-respect and an awareness of injustice, thereby overriding harmful beliefs learned through sexist socialization practices. It has even been argued that feminist theory distinguishes itself from Marxism by placing a higher premium on the role of consciousness-raising (MacKinnon, 1989), although issues of consciousness have been identified as central to Western Marxist theory since at least World War I (Gottlieb, 1992). In any case, merging of recent socialist and feminist viewpoints has resulted in renewed attention to the social-psychological aspects of oppression and domination, most especially the ways in which victims can be made "to invest in their own unhappiness" (Eagleton, 1991, p. xiii).
In some ways, this endeavor harks back to earlier psychological literatures on "identification with the aggressor" (Bettelheim, 1960; Freud, 1946), "self-hatred" among members of oppressed groups (AlIport, 1954a; Lewin, 1941; Sarnoff, 1951), and the "authoritarian personality" (Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, & Sanford, 1950). Because of the strong influence of psychoanalytic theory in the 1940s and 1950s (McGuire, 1993), these phenomena were often conceptualized in terms of deep-seated personality and motivational conflicts, rather than "normal" social and cognitive responses to material and ideological domination (see Jost & Banaji, 1994). As a result, the study of false consciousness rarely went beyond the application of Freudian mechanisms, such as repression, denial, and projection, to social and political situations (Pochoda, 1978).
FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS DEFINED
The concept of false consciousness in the present context helps to identify inaccurate beliefs of subordinates which serve to perpetuate their social, econom 7 ic, or sexual domination (Cunningham, 1987; Eagleton, 1991; Elster, 1982; MacKinnon, 1989). A consciousness is "false" when it serves to perpetuate inequality by leading members of a subordinate group to believe that they are inferior, deserving of their plight, or incapable of taking action against the causes 'Jof their subordination. At the most general level, false consciousness refers to the ' 1" harbouring of false beliefs that sustain one's own oppression" (Cunningham, 1987, p. 255). Specific examples, as we shall see, might include denying that injustice or disadvantage occurs, believing that social change is impossible or undesirable, making false attributions about the causes of political suffering, and adopting the norms of one's oppressor. The clearest cases of false consciousness must satisfy, through empirical observation, two independent criteria (Cunningham, 1987; Meyerson, 1991): (i) The belief must first of all be "false" in the epistemological sense of being contrary to fact. (ii) Secondly, it must be "false" in the sense of failing to reflect one's genuine social interests. Taking the two components together, we define false consciousness as the holding offalse or inaccurate beliefs that are contrary to one's own social interest and which thereby contribute to the maintenance of the disadvantaged position of the selfor the group.
Of course, the two dimensions of epistemological (in) validity and (in) congruence with objective social interest are in principle orthogonal. It is possible, for example, for one to possess false beliefs that are helpful in terms of one's mental health or by serving some other social function (see Taylor & Brown, 1988, for a review); these have been dubbed "positive illusions" (Taylor, 1989), and they are to be contrasted with the socially and politically harmful beliefs we review here. Likewise, it is at least logically possible to hold true beliefs (but see MeGuire, 1989, for a "tragic theory of knowledge" as misrepresentation), and the holding of these beliefs may be either contrary to one's best interests, as in the case of "depressive realism" (Alloy & Abramson, 1979), or, under more fortunate circumstances, in accord with one's personal and social interests. Lukács (1971) referred to the holding of true beliefs that are congruent with objective interests as the "ascribed consciousness" of the lower class, and he argued that: "By relating consciousness to the whole of society it becomes possible to infer the thoughts and feelings which men would have in a particular situation if they were able to assess both it and the interests arising from it" (p. 51).
Beliefs associated with false consciousness may be thought of as social and political heuristics. Like the cognitive heuristics documented by Kahneman. Slovic, and Tversky (1982) and Nisbett and Ross (1980), they may be based on useful assumptions or principles, yet they are often extended beyond contexts of utility and result in judgments or behaviors which are costly to the individual and to society. This is not to say that all instances of false consciousness originate from a "kernel of truth," only that "normal" cognitive processes may be implicated in the justification of oppressive social relations (see Jost & Banaji, 1994). It has been argued, for example, that "the effective dissemination of ideas is only possible.. .to the extent that [they].. .do have a sufficient degree of effectiveness both in rendering social reality intelligible and in guiding practice within it for them to be apparently acceptable" (Mepham, 1972, p. 12). In the case of socio-political heuristics associated with false consciousness, the costs are not necessarily measured against positive cognitive outcomes such as rationality (Nisbett & Ross, 1980; cf. Abelson, 1976), although they might be (Elster, 1982, 1985), but against positive social and political outcomes like the achievement of life satisfaction, equality of opportunity, freedom from oppression, recognition of injustice, and participation in progressive social change. False consciousness, by contrast, leads to the development of "needs which perpetuate toil, aggressiveness, misery, and injustice" (Marcuse, 1964, p. 5).
The central thesis of this paper is that there already exists a considerable amount of scientific evidence for the proposition that people will hold false beliefs which justify their own subordination, although this evidence is not ordinarily recognized as supportive of a false consciousness approach. With very few exceptions (Billig, 1976, 1982; Fine, 1979; Jost & Banaji, 1994; Kluegel & Smith, 1986; Tyler & McGraw, 1986), social and political psychologists have ignored the phenomenon altogether, although they certainly have not shied away from the neighboring topic of ideology (inter alia, AlIport, 1954b; Kinder & Sears, 1985; Lane, 1962; MeGuire, 1993; Rosenberg, 1988; Sniderman & Tetlock, 1986a). The concept of political acquiescence (ef. Edelman, 1960) also plays a significant role in Marxian accounts of ideology and false consciousness (Billig, 1982; Tyler & McGraw, 1986), insofar as the failure to participate in collective action may be linked to errors in social cognition. It is hoped that by clarifying and extending the concept of false consciousness, it will be possible to attend to the social and cognitive bases of political acquiescence and to develop a theoretical account of the causes and consequences of false belief systems that sustain social oppression.
A PRELIMINARY TAXONOMY FOR THE STUDY OF FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS
There are many ways in which one might attempt to classify different varieties of false consciousness. No rigorous or consensual taxonomy exists for the types of beliefs which qualify for false consciousness, and writings on the subject have tended to be rather piecemeal and incomplete. Cunningham (1987) suggests two main types of false consciousness, fatalism and the false identification of blame. While these seem to satisfy the definitional criteria for false consciousness, they are not likely to be exhaustive. A more complete picture emerges by adding to these the categories of failure to perceive injustice and disadvantage; justification of social roles and statuses; identification with the oppressor; and resistance to change. Beliefs of these types, it is argued, are politically harmful for their adherents, insofar as they increase the possibility of acquiescence to otherwise unacceptable conditions or circumstances. Of course, these types are not meant to be mutually exclusive in practice. People often deny that an injustice occurs, and this may make them more likely to blame themselves or to believe that protest is undesirable, and so on. Nevertheless, it is useful to distinguish between the different types of illusory beliefs that are capable of stifling constructive political change. I turn now to a brief review of the psychological evidence for each type.
Failure to perceive injustice and disadvantage
Failure to perceive injustice. A growing body of research on beliefs about distributive and procedural justice leads to the conclusion that people frequently perceive situations to be fair or just, even when there are good reasons to suppose that such situations are not (Crosby, 1982; Deutsch, 1985; Fine, 1979; Jennings, 1991; Lerner, 1980; Lind & Tyler, 1988; Major, 1994; Martin, 1986; Tyler, 1990). The data researchers cite seem to support Elsters (1982) hypothesis that there is "a tendency of the oppressed and exploited classes in a society to believe in the justice of the social order that oppresses them" (p. 131). Almost surely, beliefs of this type would violate personal and group interests by contributing to political acquiescence even in the face of widespread injustice.
Much of the evidence that people avoid perceiving injustice has been collected by Lerner (1980), who hypothesizes that there is a motivation to believe that the world is a just place, since it is only in such a world that one's own outcomes are safe or under control. If, indeed, people are motivated to maintain the illusion that the world is just, then it is an illusion which comes at some political cost to the individual and the group. For instance, the belief in a just world may lead victims of injustice to minimize the extent of the victimization and to blame themselves for it (Janoff-Bulman, 1992; Miller & Porter, 1983). People who score high on the 'lust world scale" have been found to protect existing social institutions and political leaders (believing, for example, that Nixon was less guilty of the Watergate crimes than did control groups) and to derogate members of underprivileged groups (Robin & Peplau, 1975). The belief tn a just world has been found to correlate negatively with subjects' self-reported participation in social and political activism and with global self-ratings of social and political involvement (Robin & Peplau, 1973). Furnham (1985) has reported that whites in South Africa are more likely to believe in a just world than white equivalents in Great Britain, suggesting perhaps that perceptions of injustice are, under some circumstances, '' false'' in the sense of being unresponsive to reality: just world beliefs were higher than usual in the context of a society that is infamous for its racial injustice.
Tyler and colleagues have sought to understand why people maintain loyalty to legal and political institutions even when such institutions produce unfavorable outcomes for them (Lind &Tyler, 1988; Tyler, 1990; Tyler & McGraw, 1986). It has been found repeatedly that people are satisfied with procedural systems as long as they are provided with an opportunity to participate in the process, even if their participation has no effect over relevant outcomes and even if the outcomes are negative (Lind & Tyler, 1988; Tyler, 1990). A vast literature on the "illusion of control" points to a similar conclusion: random outcomes may be experienced as chosen or controlled, so long as the individual feels that he or she played some part (however irrelevant) in the determining process (see Taylor & Brown, 1988). Of course, institutional loyalty in and of itself is not harmful to the individual or the social group; the effective organization (and improvement) of social and political life may require some degree of allegiance to the existing system (Tyler, 1990). Nevertheless, a sense of political mistrust has been identified as essential to group consciousness-raising and the achievement of progressive social change (Gurin, 1985; Piven & Cloward, 1977; Shingles, 1981). Tyler and McGraw (1986) argue convincingly that the tendency to focus on procedural rather than outcome issues may be seen as a type of false consciousness because it leads to political acquiescence even in the face of injustice. They conclude that:
people's views about procedural justice are dysfunctional. tn particular, citizens focus heavily upon the extent to which they have an opportunity to present evidence when evaluating authorities, but they pay little attention to the extent to which they have actually influenced decisions.. .the disadvantaged are led to focus upon aspects of iheir situation that are ineffective in inducing a sense of injusiice and, hence, lead to political quiescence. (p. 126, emphasis added)
It seems, therefore, that people may accept unsatisfactory outcomes if they can be made to believe (even falsely) that the procedure used to determine them ts fair or legitimate. In assessing the fairness of pay differentials between men and women, for example, it has been found that women attend more to the legitimacy of procedures that determine payment than to the legitimacy of the payment outcomes themselves (Major, 1994).
One way in which victims of injustice may fail to perceive their present situations as unjust is by comparing them to past situations of even greater injustice, that is, by making intrapersonal rather than interpersonal or intergroup justice comparisons (Major, 1994). It has also been demonstrated that women tend to compare their wages to those of other women and avoid comparing them with the wages of men (Crosby, 1982; Major, 1994). The result of failing to perceive the injustice of one's circumstances is a depressed sense of entitlement. Major, MeFarlin, and Gagnon (1984) found that in the absence of information about what others were being paid women tended to pay themselves 61% of what men paid themselves for the same amount of work. In a follow-up experiment, men and women were offered equal payment and asked to work for as long as they deemed appropriate; women worked more than a third longer and made fewer mistakes. Major (1994, p. 309) concludes from these results and others that an "important consequence of social inequality is that it is often appraised as legitimate" and is therefore likely to be perpetuated (cf. Jost & Banaji, 1994).
Failure to perceive disadvantage. Just as people sometimes fail to perceive injustices, they may also fail to realize that they are materially deprived compared to some absolute or relative standard (Crosby, 1982; Guimond & Dubé-Simard, 1983; Gurin, 1985; Janoff-Bulman, 1992; Kluegel & Smith, 1986; Major, 1994; Smith, Spears, & Oyen, 1994; Taylor, Wright, Moghaddam, & La-londe, 1990). Denying that disadvantage exists may breed a sort of contentment with circumstances that otherwise might seem intolerable. This phenomenon has been termed "paradoxical contentment" (Crosby, 1982; Major, 1994). It has been found, for example, that while most wives admit to performing far more housework and childcare than their husbands (even when both hold jobs outside of the home), they profess satisfaction with the unequal arrangement (Biemat & Wortman, 1991). Major( 1994) has argued that women's tolerance of inequality in the division of labor stems from a diminished sense of personal entitlement and a (partial) acceptance of societal norms justifying women's disadvantaged status.
Crosby and colleagues have obtained considerable evidence for the notion that even when people perceive their group to be a target of discrimination, they still deny that they themselves are disadvantaged (Crosby, 1982; Crosby, Pufall, Snyder, O'Connell, & Whalen, 1989). This phenomenon has been shown to hold for women in the workplace (Crosby, 1982), politically active lesbians (Crosby et al., 1989), Francophones in Quebec (Guimond & Dub& Simard, 1983), and Haitian and South Asian women in Canada (Taylor et al., 1990). Crosby et al. (1989) conclude that:
we must not measure the need for social reform by how upset people feel with their personal situations in life. Karl Marx was right about fatse consciousness: those who are oppressed or disadvantaged rarely have a well-developed sense of their own disadvantage. (p. 94, emphasis added)
Whether the denial of disadvantage is a function of motivational or cognitive biases or both (Taylor et al., 1990), it has the potential for delaying effective political protest. If people do not recognize that they are disadvantaged, then they are extremely unlikely to engage in political activities aimed at eliminating the disadvantage (Crosby et al., 1989; Major, 1994).
Even if people recognize that they themselves are disadvantaged, they will not take action against the source of their disadvantage unless they perceive that their entire social group is in a state of relative deprivation (Guimond & Dub& -Simard, 1983; Walker & Mann, 1987). In a particularly dramatic demonstration, perceptions of group deprivation among unemployed workers in Australia were found to correlate significantly with an orientation to engage in social protest, while perceptions of individual deprivation were found to correlate only with self-reported stress symptoms (Walker & Mann, 1987). There are many reasons, however, why people would deny the disadvantaged status of their group. According to social identity theory, for example, low-status groups often compen sate for an inferior social identity by ignoring or reinterpreting objective status differences (Tajfel & Turner, 1986), just as individuals "fabricate and ignore social reality" in order to preserve a positive self-image (Goethals, 1986). While such assessments may protect individual or collective self-esteem in the short run, they could be socially or politically disastrous in the long run if they stifle attempts at personal or social change. It may be argued, for example, that the use of "downward social comparison" principles (Taylor et al., 1983) results in political complacency by providing a constant mechanism for all but the most severely deprived to avoid perceiving themselves as disadvantaged.
Fatalism
Protest is futile. The belief that effective social organization is futile or impossible amounts to a resigned acceptance of the current political system (Cunningham, 1987). For example, Parkin (1971) writes that "accommodation to material insecurity or deprivation betokens a kind of fatalistic pessimism" (p. 90), the political consequence of which is almost undoubtedly acquiescence. Certainly one will not attempt change if one believes that change is impossible. It has been shown that political apathy is greatest among social groups that are most severely deprived (Shingles, 1981; Van Snippenburg & Scheepers, 1991). Bagguley (1992) has argued that increasing political fatalism among unemployed workers in Britain in the 1980s was related to historical changes such as a decrease in the governments responsiveness tt) social protest and a lessenirtg of organizational and cultural resources within the workers' movement (see also Piven & Cloward, 1977). Survey data reported by Kluegel and Smith (1986) indicate that a majority of U. S. respondents now perceive qualitative social change to be virtually impossible.
Psychologists have referred to the phenomenon of "fatalistic pessimism" resulting from deprivation as "learned helplessness" (Seligman, 1975), although the latter has usually been seen as a purely cognitive-biological mechanism, without much attention to its social or political context. Nevertheless, it is possible to apply the learned helplessness model to feelings of apathy, passivity, and futility among victims of sexual and physical assault (Peterson & Seligman, 1983; Strube, 1988). To the extent that beliefs about helplessness may be seen as a cause as well as an effect of victimization, they may represent a kind of false consciousness taught to the victim in order to prolong the abuse and win his or her resignation.
Protest is embarrassing. The phenomenon of pluralistic ignorance (Miller & McFarland, 1991; Miller & Prentice, 1994; Noelle-Neumann, 1984) may reasonably be thought of as a kind of false consciousness, because it involves an illusion which may prove to be politically harmful. According to Miller and McFarland (1991), there are important cases of pluralistic ignorance which are like the story of the Emperor's New Clothes: each individual suppresses doubts he or she has about the present situation and simultaneously interprets others' silence as genuine satisfaction. Consequently, an undesirable state of affairs may be perpetuated because each group member is embarrassed or afraid to voice his or her own dissatisfaction, even though it is actually shared by the group as a whole. It has been shown that inaccurate perceptions of social norms have led entire communities, for example, to prohibit the use of alcohol, to engage in excessive alcohol use, to endorse racial segregation, and to express religious devotion long after these behaviors were favored privately by a majority of the residents (see Miller & Prentice, 1994, for a review). Pluralistic ignorance may be thought of as a form of false consciousness; because of a distorted understanding of social reality, dissatisfied group members are rendered incapable of collective organization, and political acquiescence results. Miller and McFarland (1991) write:
desist from advocating neededreforms all because they assume the majority of their peers disagree with them and believe that nothing, other than embarrassment, could be gained by revealing their true beliefs. (pp. 304-305, emphasis added).
Interestingly, they advocate one strategy for overcoming pluralistic ignorance that Marxian and feminist scholars have offered for overcoming false consetousness in general: "providing people with evidence of the commonness of their problems" (p. 307). By breaking the conspiracy of silence and raising group consciousness, it may be possible to eliminate the false believe that social change is impossible because it is counternormative.
Protest is exhausting. Piven and Cloward (1977) have noted in their study of the four major protest movements of 20th-century U. S. A. that even the most successful challenges to the status quo eventually collapse from the strain of protest. The authors suggest that once organizations achieve some success, the mass mobilization which drove the movement tends to subside, leaving the organization's leadership to continue to press for social change. The organizational leadership, once in place, tends to preoccupy itself with self-preservation, eventually turning to traditional elite institutions for funding and support, while blunting the movement's militancy. Piven and Cloward argue that political acquiescence is the rule because dissenting is so costly to those involved, and whatever disruptions do occur are always shortlived. False consciousness plays a prominent role in their story. They write that "People whose only possible recourse in struggle is to defy the beliefs and rituals laid down by their rulers ordinarily do not" (p. 2). The belief that sustained social protest is impossible surely counts as a case of false consciousness, as it clearly serves the interests of the dominant and thwarts the interests of the dominated.
Justification of social roles
McMurtry (1978) writes that one of the main forms of social consciousness which may be put to ideological use involves the premise that "Whatever rank is held by individuals in the social order represents their intrinsic worth." Beliefs of this type serve to justify systems of inequality and to convince disadvantaged groups and individuals that they are either deserving of their place or incapable of occupying any other rank (Cunningham, 1987; Jost & Banaji, 1994). At the interpersonal level of analysis, this means that perceivers will form impressions about others which are consonant with the positions or roles they occupy; social tnteraction therefore tends to reflect and reproduce existing inequalities (Athay & Darley, 1985). At the group level, this means that stereotypes will develop to explain, legitimate, and perpetuate status and power differences between social groups. In either case, one develops the false impression that people succeed or fail solely because of inherent characteristics about themselves. The established tendency to favor psychological explanations which emphasize internal attributes of social actors (rather than, for example, their external circumstances) has been called the "norm of internality," and it has been implicated in practices of social evaluation and the maintenance of the status quo (Beauvois & Dubois, 1988; Ichheiser, 1970; Nisbett & Ross, 1980).
Person perception as justification. A number of studies have demonstrated that people will draw inferences about the attributes of the self and others on the basis of information about status or wealth (Cherulnik & Bayless, 1986; Darley & Gross, 1983; Dittmar, 1992). For example, Darley and Gross (1983) found that people judged a child's intellectual abilities to be higher when she was portrayed in a middle-class environment than when she was portrayed in a working-class environment, and this difference was magnified by presenting subjects with additional nondiagnostic information, which subjects presumably used to justify their biased impressions (ef. Yzerbyt, Schadron, Leyens, & Rocher, 1994). Similarly, Dittmar (1992) reported that wealthy individuals were perceived to be more intelligent than poor individuals, and this was found to be true for poor perceivers as well as wealthy perceivers. The evidence was interpreted as supporting a "dominant ideology" model of impression-formation as against a "similarity-based" model, because the poorer subjects seemed to accept social beliefs justifying the material success of others.
Just as status and wealth are often used as cues in person perception, so too are social roles that targets occupy. For instance, Ross, Amabile, and Steinmetz (1977) found that people attributed greater knowledge to subjects assigned randomly to the role of "Questioner" than to subjects assigned to the role of "Contestant" in a mock game of "Jeopardy." This was due to the fact that contestants but not questioners, because of the requirements of their social roles, were forced to express the limitations of their knowledge in response to difficult questions posed to them. The authors take their findings to indicate a "social-perception bias," and they conclude that people "are apt to underestimate the extent to which seemingly positive attributes of the powerful simply reflect the advantages of social control" (p. 494). Inferring personal attributes on the basis of status or social role is likely to engender acceptance of the existing social order, whether or not that order is worth preserving. The belief that people occupy certain roles in society because they are naturally suited for them contributes a misleading sense of legitimacy and inevitability to the system (cf. Sidanius & Pratto, 1993).
Stereotyping as justification, lost and Banaji (1994) reviewed the research literature on stereotyping from a false consciousness perspective and found considerable support for the notion that advantaged and disadvantaged groups subscribe to stereotypic beliefs about themselves in such a way that their status or role seems justifiable or appropriate. This approach helps to explain, among other things, why women possess largely the same gender stereotypes as men (Basow, 1986) and why blacks subscribe to similar racial stereotypes as do whites (Dovidio & Gaertner, 1986). The specific mechanisms of social influence through which stereotypes serving dominant groups come to be shared by the rest of society represent opportunities for future research.
In an experimental demonstration of stereotyping as social rationalization, Hoffman and Hurst (1990) reported that a fictional group comprised of "child raisers" was judged to be more patient, kind, and understanding than a group of "city workers," who were judged to be self-confident and forceful. The authors argued that such stereotypes serve ideological functions of justifying the status quo and that gender stereotypes in particular "originate in an attempt to rationalize the division of labor by attributing to each sex those qualities deemed necessary for performance of the assigned functions" (pp. 206 - 207). To the extent that people stereotype themselves and others in role-consistent ways, then they may believe falsely that particular forms of inequality and exploitation are justifiable (see lost & Banaji, 1994).
False attribution of blame
The analysis of false blame, identified by Cunningham (1987) as a case of false consciousness, is particularly well-suited for social psychological study, because it deals with how people identify the causes of events, in other words, how they make attributions for occurrences in their social and physical environment. The attribution of blame and responsibility has been a particularly active area of psychological research, although the link to false consciousness has not been made. Nevertheless, there are several ways in which false blame can perpetuate oppression. If the victims of oppression can be made to blame themselves for their misfortune, then they will never think to challenge the system. The next best thing, from the standpoint of the dominant, is that the subordinated groups will blame each other or someone else and therefore fail to attach any blame to those who benefit the most. Piven and Cloward (1977) write that "Ordinarily, when people suffer.. .hardships, they blame God, or they blame themselves" (p. 12). In either case, it is unlikely that disadvantaged groups and individuals will engage in activities to eliminate the sources of their disadvantage.
Self blame. As we have seen, Lerner (1980) argues that people are motivated to subscribe to a "belief in a just world" in which people "get what they deserve," for it is only in such a world that people can have control over outcomes. The theory has been applied to the phenomenon of self-blame among victims of violence (Miller & Porter, 1983). Research suggests that people would prefer to accept responsibility for trauma rather than acknowledge that some events are beyond their personal control (Janoff-Bulman, 1992; Lerner, 1980; Miller & Porter, 1983). Even when victims of sexual and physical assault do not engage in general "characterological self-blame," they frequently attribute the victimization to their own specific behaviors prior to the event or events (Janoff-Bulman, 1992). Evidence of self-blame among unemployed workers has also been documented (Breakwell, 1986; Guimond, Begin, & Palmer, 1989). In general, self-blame may be expected to have very negative psychological as well as political consequences for oppressed groups and individuals.
False other blame. If disadvantaged groups can be made to blame the wrong source of their misfortune, then they may fail to identify the most useful political solutions available to them. For instance, racist or sexist attributions among the working classes may serve to distract them from meaningful collective action (Cunningham, 1987; Lipset, 1960; Okami, 1992; WilIheIm, 1980). Social psychologists have referred to this phenomenon as "scape-goating" (AlIport, 1954a). Cunningham (1987, p. 254) writes that "Male workers think that women's incursion into traditionally male-dominated work is the root cause of job insecurity. This, too, is an instance of false consciousness insofar as the belief helps to keep the labour force divided." Consistent with the possibility of false consciousness, Tajfel (1978) has collected experimental and field evidence that low-status groups are more likely to compete with one another than with high-status groups. Long ago, Marx (1869) wrote about the relationship between the English and Irish working classes that:
The average English worker hates the Irish as a competitor who lowers his wages and level of living. He feels national and religious antagonism towards him. He appears to him in much the same light as the black slaves appear to the poor whites in the Southem States of North America. This antagonism between the proletarians of England is artificially cultivated and maintained by the bourgeoisie. It knows that in this antagonism lies the real secret of maintaining its power. (p. 196)
The conspiratorial implications of remarks such as these have often sounded implausible to social scientists who doubt the existence of a "ruling class." However, it is important to realize that the spreading of false blame and other types of false consciousness need not be a conscious or deliberate strategy on the part of dominant groups or individuals (Eagleton, 1991; Elster, 1982). It may happen rather unintentionally through the usual avenues of social influence each time powerful sources express the interests, perceptions, and abilities that are derived from their social roles (ef. Ross, Amabile, & Steinmetz, 1977). Gramsci (1971), for example, writes of the "'spontaneous' consent given by the great masses of the population to the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group" and proposes that "this consent is 'historically' caused by the prestige (and consequent confidence) which the dominant group enjoys" (p. l2). Because powerful sources are paid more attention than powerless sources (Fiske, 1993), because they are more skilled at manipulating social interactions (Athay & Darley, 1985), and because they are more persuasive in general (MeGuire, 1985), it should not be too surprising that ideas reflecting the interests of powerful individuals and groups are widespread, even among the powerless.
Identification with the oppressor
Psychological dependence. Mason (1971) suggests that "psychological dependence" often results from the relations of domination and subordination. Based upon a review of the historical and anthropological data, Mason argues that dominant groups frequently convince others to protect them from internal and external threats to their supremacy. This is achieved by fostering dependence among subordinates, creating a sense that society requires the existence of rulers and the ruled; in this way, subjects may be led unwittingly to protect systems which place them at a disadvantage (cf. Sidanius, 1993). Mason (1971) even claims that subordinates will not "feel secure unless they are grouped together in clans or castes or guilds, within which they have a recognized part to play, a known position in the hierarchy and known obligations to fulfil" (p. 10). Thus, people may come to depend upon their rulers for purpose and direction (ef. ettelheim, 1960; Lifton, 1961; Schein, 1956).
A further step in the process of social and political dependence is provided by a cognitive dissonance analysis of the effect of initiation rites on commitment (see Cialdini, 1988, for a review). It is theorized that people attempt to justify their participation in painful or humiliating activities by increasing rather than decreasing their commitment to the group or institution. Thus, the most horrific systems may produce the highest degrees of loyalty and dependence (Brickman, 1987). This analysis has been applied to victims of abusive relationships in an effort to understand their continued commitment to their abusers (Strube, 1988). hus, inferring self-commitment on the basis of abuse may be one among several types T of false beliefs involved in the decision to stay in an abusive relationship.
Preference for the outgroup. According to received wisdom in the field of Intergroup relations, group members are motivated to maintain the evaluative superiority of the ingroup by favoring similar others and discriminating against dissimilar others (Tajfel & Turner, 1986). However, there have been numerous reports over the years of outgroup preferences among disadvantaged group members (inter alia, Allport, 1954a; Clark & Clark, 1947; Fine & Bowers, 1984; Giles & Powesland, 1975; Vaughan, 1978). Experimental evidence of outgroup favoritism among groups of low status or power has been growing (Sachdev & Bourhis, 1985, 1987; see Hinkle & Brown, 1990, for a review). It has been argued that outgroup favoritism serves to perpetuate inequality by leading members of subordinate groups to believe that they are inferior, deserving of their plight, or incapable of taking action against the causes of their subordination (Jost & Banaji, 1994; Sidanius, 1993; Sidanius & Pratto, 1993). D6pret and Fiske (1993) have found that members of powerless groups are apt to identify with the outgroup unless there are reasons to suspect that a conspiracy is underway (see also Crocker, Broadnax, Luhtanen, & Blame, 1993, on the role of conspiracy theories in group consciousness-raising). As Eagleton has written in his recent study of ideology and false consciousness, "the most efficient oppressor is the one who persuades his underlings to love, desire and identify with his power" (p. xiii).
Resistance to change
Cognitive conservatism. Researchers have long noted the tendency to assume a preexisting state of affairs and make minor adjustments to it rather than introducing wholesale change. The phenomenon has been referred to as "anchoring" (Kahneman et al., 1982). While most of this research has had little to do with political systems, Azzi and Jost (1994) found in a study of people's preferences for procedural justice that subjects were strongly anchored by the experimental status quo. When given a free choice to implement virtually any type of decision-making procedure, subjects' responses were strongly constrained by the experimental condition to which they were randomly assigned. Related to this may be a "status quo effect," whereby decision-makers exhibit a clear preference for the existing state of affairs although new options would bring about outcomes that are better than or the same as old ones (Quattrone & Tversky, 1988; Samuelson & Zeckhauser, 1987).
Greenwald (1980) introduced the term "cognitive conservatism" to refer to the tendency to adhere to thoughts or beliefs which are no longer adaptive or functional. In the domain of political cognition, this propensity could contribute to the preservation of undesirable ideas and circumstances simply because they require no change to attitudes or beliefs (see also Janoff-Bulman, 1992). Cognitive conservatism is similar to fatalism in its consequences, but it involves the belief that change, in itself, is aversive, not just difficult to achieve.
Behavioral conservatism. In a fashion analogous to the problem of cognitive conservatism, people may stick disproportionately with past practices simply because they are familiar or habitual. Hackman and Oldham (1980), for example, have documented the ways in which employees tend to reproduce inefficient work arrangements simply to preserve past organizational practices. Undoubtedly, bringing about substantial social or political change would require considerable revision of one's behavior, and this may be costly or difficult under some circumstances. However, believing that that behavior is best which requires the least amount of change can result in a spiraling of disadvantage, similar to the problem of "sunk costs" (ef. Strube, 1988). If one continues to engage in harmful behaviors, either out of habit or in order to justify past efforts, then one may perpetuate a system or relationship to the detriment of the self or the group (ef. Brickman, 1987; Janoff-Bulman, 1992).
FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS AS A TOPIC FOR POLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY
Just as social psychologists frequently have urged their field to "socialize" their subject matter (inter alia, Carlson, 1984; Israel & Tajfel, 1972; Pepitone, 1981; Steiner, 1974), 1 propose that it is time to "politicize" empirical psychology by addressing the political context of domination and subordination which surrounds most of our thinking and behaving in the social world. The phenomenon of false consciousness provides just such an opportunity. Affective and cognitive bases of human error are now well understood; virtually no attention, however, has been given to social and political circumstances (such as status, power, inequality, injustice, exploitation, and abuse) that foster negative illusions.
Unlike false consciousness, ideology has been a favorite topic of political psychologists from the moment their field was founded (Lane, 1962; Sears, 1969). It continues to occupy pride of place as one of the defining constructs of the discipline (Kinder & Sears, 1985; Sniderman & Tetlock, 1986a). In the Marxian tradition, as we have seen, the concepts of ideology and false consciousness are intertwined (Abererombie, Hill, & Turner, 1980; Eagleton, 1991; Gabel, 1975; Gramsci, 1971; Mepham, 1972). Because of ruling class ideology (defined as a system of ideas or beliefs that serve the dominant group's social interests at the expense of other groups), Marxists have argued that most people's understandings of social and political reality are distorted, inverted, and false (Eagleton, 1991; Wood, 1988). Significantly, however, mainstream social science came to drop the negative evaluation associated with ideological thinking (AlIport, 1954b; Mannheim, 1936), and the search for ideology became not a search for false or distorted conceptions of the political world (the effects of ideology), but the search for coherent, consistent belief systems on the part of politically motivated individuals (Bell, 1960; Converse, 1964). By urging a return to the evaluative conception of ideology, that is, to the study of false consciousness, I am not simply expressing a preference for the terminology of Marx over Bell, Converse, and others. I have argued that there is considerable, but neglected, evidence for the empirical proposition that people's responses to social and political systems are very often inaccurate and maladaptive for them. Of course, the question of whether some (or most) people do indeed possess highly sophisticated and integrated systems of political beliefs is a valid and useful empirical question (Bell, 1960; Converse, 1964; Kinder & Sears, l985; MeGuire, 1985), but it is important also to recognize the opposite, namely the degree to which errors in social cognition serve as an impediment to accurate and useful representation of the political world.
POTENTIAL OBJECTIONS TO THE PSYCHOLOGICAL STUDY OF FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS
The concept of false consciousness is one which is bound to be met with substantial resistance on the part of contemporary Western social scientists, perhaps with good reason. It may be seen as a vestige of communist doctrine, a political philosophy that is widely assumed to have been disproven by historical developments. The purpose of this paper is not to advance a doctrinaire concept to be adhered to despite evidence to the contrary, but to salvage an important, perhaps even essential, insight for political psychology, namely that errors in cognition produce levels of political acquiescence that may be harmful to the individual, the group, and the society. Therefore, it seems worthwhile to raise and defend against some of the most likely objections to the study of false consciousness (for other defenses in the philosophical literature, see Cunningham, 1987; Meyerson, 1991; Runciman, 1969). Six main objections will be considered here: (a) the term "false consciousness" is too evaluative; (b) it discounts people's subjective accounts of their own situations; (c) it blames the victim; (d) it is unfalsifiable; (e) it postulates internalization where compliance will do; and (f) it is too political.
The objection that the concept of false consciousness is too evaluative in its connotation is fairly easily dismissed by appealing to some examples of psychology's most commonly studied phenomena. For example, cognitive and social psychologists have long spoken of "illusions" or "biases" or "errors" in thinking or perceiving without undue worry that the terms are excessively negative. A computerized search of psychological articles indexed by PsycINFO reveals that the term "illusion" appears more than 2,200 times as a keyword during the years I 967 - 1993. Some Marxists have regarded false consciousness as a type of error in information-processing (see Elster, 1982, 1985), and Marx himself drew analogies between perceptual illusions and false consciousness (Wood, 1988). As a rule, psychologists have not been afraid to use evaluative labels such as the fundamental attribution error, correspondence bias, and pluralistic ignorance. Many psychologists have used what is likely to be the most objectionable aspect of the term "false consciousness," namely the word "false," as in discussions of "false consensus" (Marks & Miller, 1987), "false uniqueness" (Goethals, 1986), and the doubly evaluative "false fame bias" (Banaji & Greenwald, 1994).
A second objection follows as a consequence of employing evaluative language. It is that in ascribing "true" and "false" consciousness to people, one encounters the risk of privileging some social or political viewpoints over others (Lewy, 1982), possibly even repeating past practices of discrimination by ignoring oppressed group members' accounts of their own experiences (Riger, 1992). MacKinnon (1989, p. 39), for example, asks of critical feminism: "How can anything any woman thinks be called false in a theory that purports to validate all women's experience?" In general, the false consciousness perspective does indeed suggest that people's own accounts of their circumstances may be untrustworthy undcr sonic circumstances. Marcusc (1964) resolved this problem in the following way. He wrote that:
In the lasi analysis, the question of what are true and false needs must be answered by the individuals themselves, bui only in the last analysis; that is, if and when they are free to give their own answer. As long as they are kept incapable of being autonomous, as long as they are indoctrinated and manipulated (down to their very instincts), their answer to this question cannot be taken as their own. (p. 6)
Indeed, it is a noncontroversial assumption of social psychology since at least Nisbett and Wilson (1977) that it will not do to simply take people's opinions about their beliefs and desires at face value. Motivational biases, cognitive limitations, and informational complexities have all been shown to produce distortions in people's perceptions of themselves and of the social world (inter alia, Greenwald, 1980; Kahneman et al., 1982; Kunda, 1990; Nisbett & Ross, 1980; Quattrone & Tversky, 1988). The concept of false consciousness highlights political as well as psychological contributors to the inaccuracy of first-person accounts.
There is a methodological version of the claim that people's accounts of their own situations should be trusted. Such an objection would hold that it is beyond the means of psychology to determine the accuracy or inaccuracy of different accounts, and so first-person accounts should not be disputed. Social scientists often have been unwilling to decide which of the beliefs they study are true and which are false. Berger and Luckmann (1967), for example, decline to make "assertions about the ontological status of the phenomena analyzed" (p. 20). Even political psychologists have argued that the attribution of political motives and interests are beyond the methodological capabilities of the discipline (Sniderman & Tetlock, 1986b). Marx and Engels (1846) criticized the unwillingness of historians and social scientists of his age to do what every ordinary person does regularly, namely, to distinguish between true and false:
Whilst in ordinary life every shopkeeper is very well able to distinguish between what somebody professes to be and what he really is, our historians have not yet won even this trivial insight. (p. 23)
To give up the possibility of locating beliefs on dimensions of evaluation such as accuracy, self-interestedness, adaptiveness, and so on is to relinquish the claim of psychology to be a science. There are several reasons why psychologists must make such evaluations, but chief among them is that otherwise they would lack criteria for judging the validity of alternative interpretations of their data; their conclusions or beliefs about the evidence could not claim to be more accurate or useful than the beliefs of laypersons. A point of experimental control is to rule out an alternative possible account as incomplete or inaccurate. Thus, Nisbett and Wilson (1977) were able to conclude that subjects' beliefs about their own decision-making strategies were not accurate - people did not identify the "real" or "true" basis for their own preferences.
A third potential objection to the study of false consciousness is that it blames victims for their oppression by implying that it is their own weakness or ignorance that creates the situation of oppression. Victims of false consciousness may be seen as stupid or foolhardy for harboring beliefs which are contrary to their own interests. While worries such as these should be taken very seriously by the student of false consciousness, it is certainly not the purpose of such an analysis to locate responsibility or blame within the victim. As the poet Yevtushenko wrote, "No one blames an old nail sliding into a wall, it's being hammered with the butt of an axe." This is not to imply that members of subordinate groups are incapable of rejecting the dominant ideology. Indeed, consciousness-raising and "freedom of the will" play important roles in some versions of Marxian social theory, particularly those associated with the work of Gramsci (1971). Nevertheless, the aim of identifying false beliefs that perpetuate oppression is not to fault victims but to empower them (Collins, 1991; Cunningham, 1987; MacKinnon, 1989).
A fourth criticism of false consciousness is that it is used by Marxists as an escape hatch" to save their theory from the weight of disconfirming evidence (Lewy, 1982). Thus, it has been claimed that false consciousness was invoked unfairly to rationalize the apparent failure of Marx's prediction of a worldwide revolution. Indeed, there is a danger of making Marxism irrefutable by always seeking refuge in the phenomenon of false consciousness, explaining away people's aversion to revolution and communism. For this reason, false consciousness needs to be subjected to rigorous empirical confrontation with clear criteria for disconfirmation. Interestingly, Lukács, one of the Marxist scholars most associated with the concept of false consciousness, made this point directly, and it may have contributed to his exile by the Stalinist regime (Gabel, 1975). Lukács wrote:
The dialectical method does not permit us simply to proclaim the 'falseness' of this consciousness and persist in an inrtexible confrontation of true and false. On the contrary, it requires us to investigate this 'false consciousness' concretely.... (1971, p. 58)
A central contention of this paper is that the scientific study of false consciousness is a psychological endeavor, as well as a sociological, political, economic, historical, and philosophical one. The control afforded by the psychology experiment may provide the clearest concrete evidence for and against the operation of social and political illusions, as researchers found with regard to cognitive and perceptual illusions.
A fifth objection is to be found in the work of Scott (1990), who argues that what looks like false consciousness (deference to authority, tolerance of injustice, acceptance of abuse, etc.) is really a public display that differs considerably from the political resistance that disadvantaged groups and individuals express privately. Scott cites psychological research on ingratiation to support his contention that oppressed groups do not internalize the beliefs of their oppressors but rather "lay it on thick" in order to avoid punishment. While I would not deny that pressures to comply publicly with the wishes of the powerful play a significant role in the actions (if not beliefs) of the powerless, the story does not end there. In most of the experimental situations discussed above, subjects' responses were collected privately and under conditions that guaranteed anonymity (Crosby et al., 1989; Dittmar, 1992; Hoffman & Hurst, 1990; Major et al., 1984; Ross et al., 1977; Sachdev & Bourhis, 1985, 1987; Vaughan, 1978). Nevertheless, there was considerable evidence for the failure to perceive disadvantage, the justification of unequal social roles, outgroup favoritism, and other varieties of false consciousness.
A sixth and final objection to the psychological study of false consciousness is that it is too "political," meaning that it implicates a nonnormative scientific discipline in the making of prescriptions for social change. However, if it were found that widespread false beliefs such as those postulated by the false consciousness perspective had deleterious effects on people (for example, it compromised their opportunities, limited their aspirations in life, or reduced their self-esteem), then we should fully expect that social scientists would seek to undermine these self-defeating false beliefs. The notion that harmful or irrational beliefs may be identified and changed is a familiar assumption of both social and clinical psychology. For example, Nisbett's work on the deficiencies of human reasoning (Nisbett & Ross, 1980) led him and his collaborators to investigate the possibilities of educating people to make better types of decisions (Nisbett, Krantz, Jepson, & Fong, 1982). Similarly, Steele's research on highly-achieving female and minority students who had negative expectations that they would fail in school resulted in a successful intervention program whereby such false beliefs were challenged and supplanted (Steele, 1992). In the field of clinical psychology, therapeutic approaches as diverse as those advocated by psychodynamic and cognitive-behavioral theories share the assumption that individuals hold beliefs which are fundamentally unhealthy for them, and that part of therapy involves the elimination of such beliefs. There is no a priori reason why psychology should aim to be any less useful to social and political life than to other areas of human existence (Dewey, 1900; Miller, 1969).
CONCLUSION
It has been argued that the problem of false consciousness represents a potentially important but neglected field of study for social, cognitive, and especially political psychologists. In general, false consciousness refers to the holding of false beliefs that sustain one's own disadvantage. It was suggested that there are at least six main types of false consciousness and that there exists at least some psychological evidence for each of these types. After a selective review of the available evidence, some potential objections to the study of false consciousness were raised and addressed. By focusing theoretical and empirical attention on the role of false consciousness in the problem of political acquiescence, it is hoped that a more sophisticated understanding of social and political reality will emerge.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I thank Robert P. Abelson, Mahzarin R. Banaji, Jennifer Crocker, Susan T. Fiske, Donald Philip Green, Anthony G. Greenwald, William J. McGuire, Dale T. Miller, and Tom R. Tyler for their generous comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript. I am indebted also to Theresa Claire, Curtis Hardin, and Lawrence lost for their many contributions to the development of these ideas. This work was supported in part by a Graduate Fellowship from Yale University and NIMH Grant #SROl-MH32588 to William I. MeGuire.
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