A preliminary experimental examination of worldview verification, perceived racism, and stress reactivity in African Americans

Biological response to acute stress is increasingly recognized as a pathway that affects cardiovascular disease (CVD: Chida & Steptoe, 2010; Obrist, 1981; Panaite, Salomon, Jin, & Rottenberg, 2015, Phillips & Hughes, 2011), which suggests a critical need to understand how psychosocial factors influence stress reactivity (McEwen, 2012). One potentially vital but underappreciated psychosocial predictor of both stress reactivity and CVD is justice—subjective evaluations of fairness that occur in response to resource exchanges and other social interactions (for review, Jost & Kay, 2010). The psychological study of justice focuses on causes and consequences of perceived fairness, and one important consequence appears to be CVD (for reviews, Elovainio, Kivimaki & Vahtera, 2002; Lucas & Wendorf, 2012). Perceived injustice is prospectively associated with an increased incidence of CVD (De Vogli et al., 2007; Kivimaki et al., 2005) and may be as strongly implicated in CVD as are traditional risk factors such as cholesterol, body mass index, and physical activity. Furthermore, the contribution of perceived injustice to CVD appears to be unique from that of related psychosocial variables, such as effort-reward imbalance (Kivimaki et al., 2005). Importantly, perceptions of justice also affect autonomic and glucocorticoid responses to acute stress (Tomaka & Blascovich, 1994; Vermunt, Peeters & Berggren, 2007; Vermunt & Steensma, 2005), suggesting that stress reactivity may provide a mechanism through which justice influences CVD (see also Kivimaki et al., 2008). Although the contributions of justice to stress reactivity and CVD in general have been recognized, research on the role of justice in CVD disparities has lagged (Jackson, Kubzansky & Wright, 2006). This dearth is especially evident for African Americans, who have the highest CVD incidence and mortality of any ethnic group in the United States (American Heart Association, 2013). Advances in two key areas would better connect justice theory and research to ongoing interest in stress-related CVD disparities. First, cultural explorations of justice are needed to reveal the extent to which justice acts a unique psychosocial determinant of stress and subsequent CVD disparities. This includes examining the role of justice in stress reactivity processes among racial and ethnic minorities, in whom dysregulation of stress systems that impact CVD may occur (Obrist, 1981). Of current interest, whether justice is implicated in stress reactivity among African Americans remains unknown, despite a cultural history that suggests African Americans might be particularly attuned to or affected by justice-related cognition and emotion. A second key advance centers on evaluating justice alongside other culturally relevant psychosocial influences. In turn, justice may be used to better understand the role of psychosocial factors in CVD disparities, and to resolve many current contradictory findings. For example, prior research on racial identity suggests that being strongly identified as a member of one’s race or ethnicity may either protect against or exacerbate negative health effects of perceived racism (e.g., Hurd, Sellers, Cogburn, Butler-Barnes, & Zimmerman, 2013; Lucas, Wegner, Pierce, Lumley, Laurent, & Granger, in press; Thompson, Kamrack & Manuck, 2002). The potential for double-edged effects of racial identity on CVD could be further extrapolated by considering connections between racial identity and justice beliefs, which might be similarly divergently linked. Among African Americans, another highly relevant psychosocial pathway is perceived racism (Harrell, Merchant & Young, 1997). Although feeling discriminated against because of one’s race or ethnicity is a potent psychosocial predictor of CVD (Surgeon General, 2001), links between justice and racism have scarcely been examined even though experiences of injustice could be related to either chronically accessible or momentarily activated racism-related cognitions (Liang & Borders, 2012; Lucas, Hayman, Blessman, Asabigi, & Novak, in press). For example, Liang and Borders (2012) showed that among ethnic minority students, believing in an unjust world mediates positive associations between perceived ethnic discrimination and negative emotion, including anxiety and aggression. The current study evaluates worldview verification theory (WVT: Major & Townsend, 2012), which provides a framework for considering stress-related consequences of justice and for illuminating links between justice, perceived racism, and stress reactivity. According to WVT, people strive to maintain consistency between lived experiences and their enduring worldviews. Inconsistencies between experience and beliefs produce psychological threat and may influence physiological processes that contribute to CVD. Thus, WVT suggests that justice dispositions and externally imposed sources of justice jointly influence biological and psychological processes implicated in the generation of stress, and that the degree of consistency between these two sources may be crucial to stress-related CVD disparities. WVT further posits that consistency between experience and belief is essential, even if an individual views the world as unjust (Townsend, Major, Sawyer, & Mendes, 2010). In turn, biological and psychological processes that contribute to CVD disparities may be affected by the extent to which individual-level justice beliefs are consistent with contextual justice factors. Two specific stress reactivity hypotheses can be derived from WVT and its assertion that consistency between justice-related experiences and worldview is critical. First, WVT suggests that experiencing a high level of justice promotes adaptive stress responses especially among individuals who view the world as fair and just (i.e., justice congruency). This is consistent with literature showing that people are strongly motivated to maintain and protect a view of the world as just (Lerner, 1980), and that a strong belief in justice promotes well-being (for review, Lucas & Wendorf, 2012). A parallel hypothesis is that experiencing a low level of justice may promote adaptive stress responses among individuals who view the world as unjust (i.e., injustice congruency). The seemingly ironic notion—that experiencing injustice might protect wellness— is largely absent from the health literature, but some basic research supports this possibility. Specifically, van den Bos and colleagues (1999) showed that the use of an unfair decision process may promote better psychological adjustment to receiving an unjust outcome. This occurs when an unfair process allows an individual to form an external attribution for receiving an undesirable outcome, such that an unfair process may deflect the potential for an unjust outcome to result in threat to one’s self-evaluation. Extending this literature, WVT suggests that the potential effects of fair and unfair processes may be tied to their consistency with individual justice beliefs. Specifically, when experiencing an unfair outcome, a fair decision process may reduce stress for an individual with a strong just worldview, whereas a fair decision process might, counter intuitively, be more stressful to an individual with a weak just worldview. Guided by WVT, the present research was conducted to experimentally evaluate how consistency between externally imposed justice and preexisting justice tendencies influences African Americans’ cognitive and biological responses to acute stress. Connections between WVT and stress have only recently emerged, and we are unaware of any prior research on WVT and stress among African Americans. Thus, the present research was conducted as a preliminary examination to observe whether predictions of WVT might be supported in this cultural context. A sample of African Americans reported their justice beliefs and then experienced a social-evaluative stressor during which distributive justice, or the perceived fairness of outcomes (Adams, 1965), and procedural justice, or perceived fairness of decision processes used to determine outcomes (Thibaut & Walker, 1975), were simultaneously experimentally manipulated. We assessed joint effects of experimental and individual difference justice sources on biological stress responses and racism attributions. Stress responses were measured noninvasively in oral fluids and included cortisol and C-reactive protein (sCRP), the latter of which was chosen because it is a commonly used benchmark of inflammatory stress system reactivity that is especially relevant to CVD (Slavish, Graham-Engeland, Smyth, & Engeland, 2015). In measuring attributions of racism, we distinguished between perceived outcome racism (attributions of racism related to specific outcomes) and perceived process racism (attributions of racism related to specific treatment) based on available research that suggests distributive and procedural justice cognitions may be differentially linked to stress (e.g., Lucas, Alexander, Firestone, & LeBreton, 2008). Guided by WVT, we hypothesized a 3-way interaction in which responses to receiving a low level of distributive justice (unfair outcome) would be moderated by consistency between procedural justice and justice beliefs, and that maladaptive responses would be strongest when there was incongruency between procedural justice and justice beliefs. Specifically, we expected that low distributive justice would promote stronger perceived racism and biological stress responses when procedural justice was low, but only among African Americans who possessed a strong belief in justice. Alternatively, we expected that low distributive justice would promote stronger perceived racism and stress responses when procedural justice was high, but only among African Americans with a weak belief in justice.