Disentangling Reasons and Rationalizations: Exploring Perceived Fairness in Hypothetical Societies

Political psychologists often treat explicit explanations for political views as rationalizations rather than reasons and favor unconscious motives and cognitive processes as the key determinants of political ideology. We argue that "transparent-motive" theories are often dismissed too quickly in favor of "subterranean-motive" theories. We devote this chapter to finding common methodological ground for clarifying, testing, and circumscribing the claims of both the transparent-motivational theorists and the subterranean-motivational theorists, and we pose a series of empirical questions designed to explore predictions that might provide evidence that justifications are not mere by-products of the functional imperative to defend the status quo but rather functionally autonomous constellations of ideas capable of independently influencing policy