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Is a System Motive Really Necessary to Explain the System Justification Effect? A Response to Jost (2019) and Jost, Badaan, Goudarzi, Hoffarth, and Mogami (2019)

The debate between the proponents of SIMSA and SJT does not pivot on whether system justification occurs – we all agree that system justification does occur. The issue is why it occurs? System justification theory (SJT; Jost & Banaji, 1994) assumes that system justification is motivated by a special system justification motive. In contrast, the social identity model of system attitudes (SIMSA; Owuamalam, Rubin, & Spears, 2018) argues that there is insufficient conclusive evidence for this special system motive, and that system justification can be explained in terms of social identity motives, including the motivation to accurately reflect social reality and the search for a positive social identity. Here, we respond to criticisms of SIMSA, including criticisms of its social reality, ingroup bias and hope for future ingroup status explanations of system justification. We conclude that SJT theorists should decide whether system justification is oppositional to, or compatible with social identity motives, and that this dilemma could be resolved by relinquishing the theoretically problematic notion of a system justification motivation.