This book, first published in 2001, summarizes and integrates the best social scientific research in a previously neglected but rapidly emerging interdisciplinary field seeking to understand processes of legitimation and de-legitimation in social relations. Contributors are leading researchers in sociology, psychology, political science, and organizational behavior, and the themes they cover are overlapping and mutually informative. The book is constructed primarily around the authors and their theories, and there is an uncommon degree of cross talk amongst the authors. The chapters converge on key questions concerning the ways in which people construct ideological justifications or rationalizations for their own actions and for the actions of others taken on behalf of valued groups and systems. The result is a general approach to the psychological basis of social inequality, which may be applied to distinctions of race, gender, social class, occupational status, and many other forms of inequality.