Social psychology FTW

I’ve done a few years of research in psychology labs and I always anticipated I would have a career in quantitative research.  For the past 2.5 years, I’ve held positions in data librarianship for Scholars Portal and, more recently, the Map & Data Library.

My undergraduate psychology thesis considered system justification theory.  This theory concerns the human tendency to believe that social systems are fair, just, and equal – in other words, people are motivated to justify the status quo.  In my research, we tested the relationship between said system justification measures and collective group self-esteem.  In the end, we found no statistically significant (P<0.05) relationship between our variables.  However, our results did show that our study participants endorsed system justification and just world beliefs – so a win for the broader SJ theory, and a loss for our particular experiment.

I believe social psychology is invaluable because it does use quantitative, experimental measures to investigate social phenomenon – unlike sociology or other social science disciplines that are less experimentally based.

Jost, J. T., Banaji, M. R., & Nosek, B. A. (2004). A decade of system justification theory: Accumulated evidence of conscious and unconscious bolstering of the status quo. Political Psychology, 25(6), 881-919.

Jost, J., & Hunyady, O. (2003). The psychology of system justification and the palliative function of ideology. European review of social psychology, 13(1), 111-153.