In addition to serving a hegemonic function, system-justifying ideologies serve the palliative function of enabling people to feel better about inequality. We summarize three studies supporting this proposition. In the first study, an arbitrary hierarchy was created using the “Star Power”...

Our research shows that men and women differ in their use of communicative abstraction, with men using more abstract communication than women. Because people rely on communicative abstraction as a heuristic cue for power and status, women’s tendency to use less abstract communication may...

Conceptualizing probability as psychological distance, we draw on construal level theory (Trope & Liberman, 2003) to propose that decreasing an event's probability leads individuals to represent the event by its central, abstract, general features (high-level construal) rather than by its...