The Psychology of Legitimacy : Emerging Perspectives on Ideology, Justice, and Intergroup Relations

Rating:
Summary: A new social psychology!
Review: What makes something legitimate or not legitimate? Naturally the answer depends on where you live. What is legitimate in one country is often not in another. This, as well as many other issues, makes legitimacy a very difficult thing to define and to grasp.

This book gives you an understaning of legitimacy and from a lot of angles. Leading researchers in sociology, psychology, political science, and organizational behavior, all contributed to this book and the themes they cover are overlapping and mutually informative.

One of the great things about this book is that the authors of the various sections are not philosophers, they are researchers. This means here that their opinions are backed up with corresponding studies, not just endless theorizing.

The book starts with a summary of what will follow, then a section on the historical perspectives on legitimacy. The historical section offers a brief overview of what the author considers to be the best books on the topic over hundreds of years. Lots of excellent condensed information.

The book continues with sections on "Congnitive and perceptual processes in the appraisal of legitimacy", "The tolerance of injustice: implications for self and society", "Stereotyping, ideology, and the legitimation of inequality", and "institional and organizational processes of legitimation."

There is really far too much to talk about, so I'll mention a couple of my favorite findings from the book. First, tokenism (allowing a small number of a discriminated against minority to move up in society) actually helps to keep the group that is discriminated against down. Why is this so? There are many issues, one is that the token identifies himself with the higher status group and no longer with the lower status group. That means he or she is more unlikely to care about the plite of his or her "former" discriminated against group. Another reason is that the existence of tokens actually makes legitimate the higher status of the upper group in the minds of both the favored and the discriminated against groups. One of the great things about this book is that this is not just theory, it is born out in scientific tests.

Another point I found outstanding was: what is legitimate to most people? The answer is usually something is legitimate if people feel that it is right. For example, if a process is believed to be fair (or right), people will believe it is legitimate. There are many interesting reasons for this which the book talks about.

"The Psychology of Legitimacy" contains fascinating insight, studies, and excellent theory all in one place. More importantly, it is about a topic so important and far reaching that it applies to literally everyone everywhere.