Fair's fair

Are we kidding ourselves that the world is a fair and just place?

- MARC WILSON

For the introduction to this next column in my series drawing on my 2023 national survey, I'm turning back the clock to late 2016. The University of Auckland had invited American political psychology star John Jost from New York University to present several nights of talks for the Vice-Chancellor's Lecture Series. I was asked to present a local counterpoint to one of the sessions, about political and religious ideologies in Aotearoa.

Jost was the president of the International Society of Political Psychology, cementing his place among the who's who of political psychology. For me, Jost's work has two highlights. The first was in 2003 when he co-authored a paper synthesising decades of work on "conservatism" to make the argument that political attitudes and behaviours serve a psychological function.

By "conservatism" I mean the general preference for the world to remain the same, if not return to values of the past, and the relative dispreference for absolute equality. Notice I say relative "dispreference", because in Aotearoa only about one in 20 of us say we shouldn't try to make things more fair and equal.