Group domination and inequality in context: evidence for the unstable meanings of social dominance and authoritarianism

Abstract

Both social dominance orientation (SDO) and right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) are assumed to be general and relatively stable psychological orientations that individuals 'carry with them' from context to context, influencing responses to salient forms of intergroup inequality and domination. In two experimental studies we tested the relative stability of SDO (Studies 1 and 2) and RWA (Study 1). That is, we examined whether people who score relatively high on SDO/RWA in one context tend to support intergroup hierarchy and domination in other contexts. To do so, we manipulated the salience of different intergroup relationships before measuring SDO and RWA, and then observed the associations among these constructs and attitudes toward specific intergroup relationships and legitimizing ideologies (support for war, conservatism, heterosexism, and religious fundamentalism). Contrary to the assumption of relative stability, the extent to which SDO and RWA were related to these specific attitudes and ideologies varied markedly depending on the experimental context. These results highlight the contextual basis and meaning of individuals' expressed support for group-based dominance. Copyright # 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.Individual difference approaches to prejudice view support for various forms of group-based inequality and domination as resulting, at least in part, from individuals' relatively stable orientations toward intergroup relations in general. Two of the most researched individual difference predictors of prejudice are right-wing authoritarianism (RWA; Altemeyer, 1998) and social dominance orientation (SDO; Sidanius & Pratto, 1999). Numerous studies with samples from around the world provide evidence consistent with the view that RWA and SDO are relatively enduring aspects of individual psychology that have a general influence over responses to intergroup conflict, encouraging support for multiple forms of group-based domination and inequality. However, recent evidence has called into question both the stability and generality of SDO and RWA, suggesting that scores on these measures

Gender Differences in Social Dominance Orientation: Gender Invariance May Be Situation Invariance

“…Interestingly enough several of them report results from non-American settings. Some studies have failed to find a main gender effect (Bates and Heaven 2001;Lehmiller and Schmitt 2007;McIntyre et al 2007;Morrison et al 2005;Snellman and Ekehammar 2005), using both adult and student samples from Australia, the USA, the USA, Ireland, and Sweden, respectively. However, in none of these studies was the main purpose to analyze gender differences in SDO, the results were more or less byproducts and in some instances not even analyzed (although enough information was provided for simple ttests to be computed).…”

Symbolic threat and social dominance among liberals and conservatives: SDO reflects conformity to political values

“…The current studies expand research on the malleability of SDO by showing that attitudes toward inequality can reflect conformity to the ingroup's social and political values-provided, of course, that these values can be clearly defined as hierarchyenhancing or hierarchy-attenuating. Thus, our results do more than suggest that conceptualizing SDO as a stable personality variable may be problematic, a point raised by several theorists (e.g., Lehmiller & Schmitt, 2007;Schmitt et al, 2003;Sidanius et al, 2004). Because highly identified members of hierarchy-enhancing and hierarchy-attenuating groups react to SDO in opposite ways following symbolic threat, the current studies also show that the positive effects of threat and identification on SDO obtained in prior research are not generalizable to groups whose beliefs and values explicitly repudiate social hierarchies.…”

“…The present analysis suggests that perhaps this question is too broad. To obtain a finer grained and more informative answer, we might instead ask what it means for particular groups to tolerate social hierarchies (see Lehmiller & Schmitt, 2007;Schmitt et al, 2003). For hierarchyenhancing groups, tolerance of group-based hierarchies (e.g., high SDO) indicates promotion of the ingroup's core political values.…”

Participación política: el aporte discriminante de actitudes ideológicas, valores y variables sociopsicológicas

“…Ambas actitudes han sido asociadas con diversos valores políticos (Crowson, Thoma & Hestevold, 2005;Lehmiller & Schmitt, 2007;Mavor et al, 2010), con variables cognitivas (Sibley & Duckitt, 2009), con medidas de personalidad (Heaven & Bucci, 2001) y con actitudes y posicionamientos políticos-partidarios (Cárdenas, Meza, Lagues & Yañez, 2010;Crowson et al, 2005) de allí su valor para el presente trabajo. A diferencia de los antecedentes reportados, aquí se intenta comprobar el aporte de estos constructos a la discriminación entre par ticipantes y no participantes de distintas dimensiones participativas, en su mayoría no electorales.…”