What Are the Needs That System Justification Answers?

The most fundamental one is a reduction of uncertainty. Most people experience uncertainty, especially high levels of uncertainty as aversive. We want to know at least what we think about something and then move on with the rest of our lives rather than engage in a protracted informational search that could go on forever and ever. And so the status quo, I think, has an advantage over alternatives to the status quo in the sense that it is familiar and it is certain we know it.