System justification theory is a scientific theory within social psychology that proposes people have a motivation to defend and bolster the status quo, that is, to see it as good, legitimate, and desirable.
According to system justification theory, people not only want to hold favourable attitudes about themselves (ego-justification) and their own groups (group-justification), but they also want to hold favourable attitudes about the overarching social order (system-justification). A consequence of this tendency is that existing social, economic, and political arrangements tend to be preferred, and alternatives to the status quo are disparaged.
[Wikipedia]
Johnson and Fujita took this a step further to investigate whether people's willingness to see negative information about a system was related to their perception of the systems changeability. The idea being that if a system was believed to be unalterable people wouldn't want to know about its downside - so avoid a locked-in feeling - but if the system was perceived to be changeable, then they wouldn't avoid negative information.
Result: Yes. People avoid negative information about systems they believe cannot be changed.
http://pss.sagepub.com/content/23/2/133
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