Morgan Tompkins | Psych 251 | 5 October 2025
I chose Carvalho et al. (2024) Study 1 because it examines how system-justifying ideologies shape collective action tendencies, a potentially important component my research interest in belonging and dignity uncertainty in contexts of institutional precarity and poverty. Broadly, I am interested in the psychology of poverty and how cross-sectional identities (race, wealth, social mobility, gender, etc.) influence how people experiencing poverty view themselves and how that should influence intervention targeting. A recent meta-analysis (Agostini & van Zomeren, 2021) showed that the more people consider a system to be fair, the less they tend to engage in collective action against it. Consequently, I am interested in exploring how people may justify structural inequities that keep them in cycles of poverty and whether such beliefs impact their motivation to pursue change.
Carvalho et al. (2024) use a multidimensional questionnaire to test whether individuals’ beliefs that the existing social system and status quo are legitimate, fair, and justified increase ideological support for intergroup inequality and undermine motivation to get involved in actions toward changing their social systems. Their Study 1 finds that, among a general population, believing that the existing social system functions well correlates positively with support for inequality and negatively with perceived need to fight injustice. This result is of interest to me because it offers a measurable bridge between constructs that disproportionately affect groups of lower social status (such as low-income) (system justification, social dominance orientation) and real-world barriers to social mobility and action. Replicating this study with a U.S.-based sample on Prolific could test whether these dynamics generalize across cultural and economic contexts, particularly in societies with greater awareness of structural inequality but deep economic and social injustic.
This replication will follow Carvalho et al. (2024) Study 1. The original sample included 121 participants balanced for gender who volunteered to fill out a questionnaire. Participants were approached in the street and invited to fill out a survey on “the current state of society”.
The original used an in-person survey including: 1. Basic demographic information & political affiliation 2. 8-item general system-justification scale (Kay & Jost, 2003) 3. 8-item social dominance orientation short scale (Ho et al., 2015) 4. 4-item assessment on collective action (Zomeren et al., 2010)
Challenges: The main challenges of replication include adapting to an English-speaking Prolific population (vs. the original Portuguese sample) and switching from in-person data collection to online methods. Additionally, the Cronbach’s alpha in Study 1 for SDO-D (a key measure describing individuals’ preferences toward hierarchies and inequality between social groups) was quite low (α = 0.53). This suggests that the internal reliability of the SDO-D scale is questionable and could produce inconsistent results in future replications.