People who champion social equality are often the loudest critics of the political status quo. A new study finds that as nations actually achieve greater gender parity, these egalitarian individuals become much more likely to defend the very political systems they once criticized. The research, published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, shows how shifting social realities can alter deep-seated psychological motives.
After World War II, democratic societies began adopting formal legal frameworks designed to guarantee gender equality. These structural changes eventually sparked a slow but steady cultural shift toward more egalitarian attitudes across the globe. Psychologists define system justification as the human tendency to defend and rationalize the existing social or political order. Historically, researchers linked this tendency to anti-egalitarian beliefs.
People who preferred strict social hierarchies generally defended the political establishment to maintain their dominant position in society. In contrast, people with egalitarian views typically criticized the establishment in hopes of dismantling those hierarchies. Social dominance theory has guided psychological research on prejudice for decades. It proposes that human societies naturally form group-based hierarchies, but individuals vary in how much they support this structure.
Researchers have documented how a preference for hierarchy predicts prejudice against minority groups and opposition to affirmative action. Conversely, individuals who favor equality actively scan their environments for signs of unfairness and work to dismantle power imbalances. For a long time, researchers viewed these egalitarian individuals as permanent critics of the status quo. Psychologists assumed that the drive to achieve equality inherently required a person to challenge the institutions around them.
Yet, recent studies show that egalitarian people are highly accurate at detecting when inequality is actually absent. This raised a new question for psychologists. If a society successfully implements equal rights, egalitarians might logically shift from criticizing the system to defending it. Sarah Buhl, a psychologist at Chemnitz University of Technology in Germany, led a research team to test this idea in a real-world setting.
Buhl and her colleagues focused on New Zealand. Over the past decade and a half, the country has achieved high levels of gender equality, including reaching gender parity in its parliament. The researchers wanted to see if this measurable increase in societal fairness altered how women viewed the political establishment.
The researchers analyzed fourteen years of survey responses from 43,924 women who participated in the New Zealand Attitudes and Values Study between 2009 and 2023. The surveys asked participants to rate their agreement with statements supporting group-based hierarchies, which measured their level of egalitarianism. The surveys also asked participants how much they believed the national political system operated as it should, providing a measure of system justification.
To track objective changes in societal fairness, the team paired these survey responses with the country’s annual score on the Global Gender Gap Index. This index measures national parity in areas like economic participation, political empowerment, health, and education. By tracking the same women over time using a statistical technique called multi-level modeling, the researchers could observe how individual beliefs shifted in tandem with national progress.
In the earlier years of the study, when gender inequality was relatively high, the results aligned with traditional psychological expectations. Women who held anti-egalitarian views strongly defended the political system. Meanwhile, women with egalitarian views were highly critical of the establishment.
As New Zealand became more gender-equal over the fourteen-year period, this dynamic shifted. The overall population became more egalitarian. At the same time, the most egalitarian women grew less critical of the political status quo.
Because the establishment was increasingly reflecting their own values, these women began to legitimize the socio-political system. The research team used specialized statistical tests to ensure the timeline of these changes made sense. They confirmed that shifts in national gender equality preceded the changes in how women justified the system.
The research team also broke the data down by demographic groups to see if the benefits of gender equality were felt universally. They compared the responses of women from majoritized backgrounds, defined in this study as white and heterosexual, to women from minoritized backgrounds. Minoritized groups included ethnic minorities and non-heterosexual women.
The shift in system defense was driven entirely by majoritized women. As national gender equality rose, egalitarian women from majority groups became more supportive of the political system. They experienced the direct benefits of these societal changes and adjusted their political views accordingly.
For minoritized women, the rise in national gender equality did not change the relationship between their personal beliefs and their view of the establishment. Egalitarian women from minority groups remained highly critical of the political system regardless of the country’s rising score on the Global Gender Gap Index. These groups often continue to face compounded disadvantages that broad gender parity metrics do not fully capture.
When the researchers analyzed data from male participants in the same national survey, they found a different pattern. The rise in national gender equality did not lead egalitarian men to increasingly defend the system. The research team suspects this is because rising gender equality creates a psychological conflict for men, who traditionally benefit from patriarchal structures. Because men’s group interests do not directly align with dismantling male advantages, their responses to an increasingly equal status quo were more ambiguous.
Because New Zealand is already one of the most socially progressive countries in the world, the actual variation in gender equality over the study period was relatively small. The changes in survey responses, while mathematically robust, were similarly subtle. Testing these ideas in countries undergoing more dramatic social transformations could reveal even stronger shifts in public attitudes.
The Global Gender Gap Index also functions as a broad proxy for fairness. It heavily weighs representation in corporate leadership and national politics, which might not reflect the daily realities of domestic life or unpaid labor. Future studies could explore how the division of household chores or local community dynamics influences a person’s willingness to defend the political system.
Because the data relies on observing natural changes over time, it cannot prove that the rising equality scores directly caused the psychological shifts. Experimental research where participants are exposed to different levels of social progress could help confirm the exact mechanisms at play. Understanding these changes will help psychologists map how human behavior adapts to an increasingly equal world.
The study, “Rebels With(Out) a Cause: The Influence of Gender Inequality on the Relationship Between Egalitarianism and System Justification,” was authored by Sarah Buhl, Danny Osborne, Chris G. Sibley, and Frank Asbrock.