John T. Jost

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

John T. Jost is associate professor of organizational behavior in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. His research addresses issues of stereotyping, prejudice, diversity, intergroup relations, political psychology, and perceptions of justice. The focus of this work is on social psychological obstacles to innovation, equality, and social change, including conscious and unconscious tendencies to defend and rationalize the status quo.

While at Radcliffe, Jost will develop and extend the theory of system justification in collaboration with Mahzarin Banaji. Specifically, he will write a book that formally integrates a set of hypotheses concerning psychological responses to inequality and summarizes experimental and field studies on such topics as ambivalence and depressed entitlement among women, causes and consequences of political conservatism and other ideological motives, and the system-justifying consequences of being exposed to complementary stereotypes.

Jost received his PhD in social psychology from Yale University. He is a past winner of the Gordon Allport Intergroup Relations Prize, sponsored by the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues. His first book, The Psychology of Legitimacy (coedited with Brenda Major), was published in 2001 by Cambridge University Press.