System Justification Theory: What Makes Narrative Change So Hard? | Brett Davidson | Jun. 6, 2022

"...Narrative Change has emerged as a field over the past few years, as nonprofits and foundations long focused on supporting human rights saw that many of their hard-won policy victories were being reversed, or were just never implemented in practice. An entire ecosystem of organizations such as the Frameworks Institute, Narrative Initiative, and ReFrame has developed, based on the insight that in order to achieve lasting, systemic change, it is not enough just to change a few policies. We need to shift the underlying system of stories that help people make sense of the world....

System justification theory was first developed in 1994 by psychology professors John Jost and Mahzarin Banaji and over the 28 years since then, there has been plenty of research to support it. As Jost outlines in his 2020 book, A Theory of System Justification, humans are motivated to defend and justify systems even if these systems work against them. According to Jost, “people exhibit system-justifying tendencies to defend and rationalize existing social, economic, and political arrangements—sometimes even at the expense of individual and collective self-interest.” ...

So, given our human tendency to justify existing systems and resist change, how do nonprofits, activists, and funders working to change deeply held social narratives overcome this inertia? First, they need to find ways to expose the status quo for what it is—to make visible the justifying narratives and the unequal power dynamics they serve to perpetuate. Narratives are always, always tied to power—and an important first step is to expose that power for what it is. As the Frameworks Institute points out in their publication The Features of Narratives, dominant narratives, those that make the existing social order appear natural and just, embody the perspective and interests of the powerful—but do so while presenting themselves as neutral, without a particular perspective: “They seem to be told from nowhere.” An example is the narrative of meritocracy. This is seemingly neutral—anybody can succeed if they work hard enough—but in fact helps justify the position of the already rich and powerful as fairly earned, while blaming the poor and marginalized for their disadvantaged situation. One of the key steps in narrative change then is to remove that mask of naturalness and neutrality...."