Social dominance orientation (SDO), one's degree of preference for inequality among social groups, is introduced. On the basis of social dominance theory, it is shown that (a) men are more social dominance-oriented than women, (b) high-SDO people seek hierarchy-enhancing professional roles and low-SDO people seek hierarchy-attenuating roles, (c) SDO was related to beliefs in a large number of social and political ideologies that support group-based hierarchy (e.g., meritocracy and racism) and to support for policies that have implications for intergroup relations (e.g., war, civil rights, and social programs), including new policies. SDO was distinguished from interpersonal dominance, conservatism, and authoritarianism. SDO was negatively correlated with empathy, tolerance, communality, and altruism. The ramifications of SDO in social context are discussed.

One of the functions of automatic stimulus evaluation is to direct attention toward events that may have undesirable consequences for the perceiver's well-being. To test whether attentional resources are automatically directed away from an attended task to undesirable stimuli, Ss named the colors in which desirable and undesirable traits (e.g., honest, sadistic) appeared. Across 3 experiments, color-naming latencies were consistently longer for undesirable traits but did not differ within the desirable and undesirable categories. In Experiment 2, Ss also showed more incidental learning for undesirable traits, as predicted by the automatic vigilance (but not a perceptual defense) hypothesis. In Experiment 3, a diagnosticity (or base-rate) explanation of the vigilance effect was ruled out. The implications for deliberate processing in person perception and stereotyping are discussed.

A new conceptualization and measurement of social dominance orientation-individual differences in the preference for group based hierarchy and inequality-is introduced. In contrast to previous measures of social dominance orientation that were designed to be unidimensional, the new measure (SDO7) embeds theoretically grounded subdimensions of SDO-SDO-Dominance (SDO-D) and SDO-Egalitarianism (SDO-E). SDO-D constitutes a preference for systems of group-based dominance in which high status groups forcefully oppress lower status groups. SDO-E constitutes a preference for systems of group-based inequality that are maintained by an interrelated network of subtle hierarchy-enhancing ideologies and social policies. Confirmatory factor and criterion validity analyses confirmed that SDO-D and SDO-E are theoretically distinct and dissociate in terms of the intergroup outcomes they best predict. For the first time, distinct personality and individual difference bases of SDO-D and SDO-E are outlined. We clarify the construct validity of SDO by strictly assessing a preference for dominance hierarchies in general, removing a possible confound relating to support for hierarchy benefitting the ingroup. Consistent with this, results show that among members of a disadvantaged ethnic minority group (African Americans), endorsement of SDO7 is inversely related to ingroup identity. We further demonstrate these effects using nationally representative samples of U.S. Blacks and Whites, documenting the generalizability of these findings. Finally, we introduce and validate a brief 4-item measure of each dimension. This article importantly extends our theoretical understanding of one of the most generative constructs in social psychology, and introduces powerful new tools for its measurement.

Differences in the evaluation of generic statements about human and non-human categories. Cognitive Science.

and Kardes (1986) demonstrated that Ss were able to evaluate adjectives more quickly when these adjectives were immediately preceded (primed) by attitude objects of similar valence, compared with when these adjectives were primed by attitude objects of opposite valence. Moreover, this effect obtained primarily for attitude objects toward which Ss were presumed to hold highly accessible attitudes, as indexed by evaluation latency. The present research explored the generality of these findings across attitude objects and across procedural variations. The results of 3 experiments indicated that the automatic activation effect is a pervasive and relatively unconditional phenomenon. It appears that most evaluations stored in memory, for social and nonsocial objects alike, become active automatically on the mere presence or mention of the object in the environment. The research we report in this article concerns the extent to which attitudes may be activated automatically on mere observation of the attitude objects to which they correspond. This phenomenon is central to Fazio's (1986, 1989, 1990) attitude accessibility model, a theory of the process by which attitudes guide behavior. Consistent with the attitude accessibility model, we demonstrate that attitudes are capable of automatic Editor's Note. Two of the authors are Associate Editors of this journal; therefore, this article was subjected to a special review process to avoid any potential conflict of interest. I asked Anthony Greenwald, a former Editor of JPSF to handle the article. He solicited the reviews and made the recommendations that the article be published. I am grateful to him for taking on this chore.