Arnold K. Ho

Social Dominance Orientation Revisiting the Structure and Function of a Variable Predicting Social and Political Attitudes

Social dominance orientation (SDO) is one of the most powerful predictors of intergroup attitudes and behavior. Although SDO works well as a unitary construct, some analyses suggest it might consist of two complementary dimensions—SDO-Dominance (SDO-D), or the preference for some groups to dominate others, and SDO-Egalitarianism (SDO-E), a preference for nonegalitarian intergroup relations. Using seven samples from the United States and Israel, the authors confirm factor-analytic evidence and show predictive validity for both dimensions. In the United States, SDO-D was theorized and found to be more related to old-fashioned racism, zero-sum competition, and aggressive intergroup phenomena than SDO-E; SDO-E better predicted more subtle legitimizing ideologies, conservatism, and opposition to redistributive social policies. In a contentious hierarchical intergroup context (the Israeli–Palestinian context), SDO-D better predicted both conservatism and aggressive intergroup attitudes. Fundamentally, these analyses begin to establish the existence of complementary psychological orientations underlying the preference for group-based dominance and inequality.

The nature of social dominance orientation: theorizing and measuring preferences for intergroup inequality using the new SDO₇ scale

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.

Evidence for hypodescent and racial hierarchy in the categorization and perception of biracial individuals.

Individuals who qualify equally for membership in two racial groups provide a rare window into social categorization and perception. In 5 experiments, we tested the extent to which a rule of hypodescent, whereby biracial individuals are assigned the status of their socially subordinate parent group, would govern perceptions of Asian-White and Black-White targets. In Experiment 1, in spite of posing explicit questions concerning Asian-White and Black-White targets, hypodescent was observed in both cases and more strongly in Black-White social categorization. Experiments 2A and 2B used a speeded response task and again revealed evidence of hypodescent in both cases, as well as a stronger effect in the Black-White target condition. In Experiments 3A and 3B, social perception was studied with a face-morphing task. Participants required a face to be lower in proportion minority to be perceived as minority than in proportion White to be perceived as White. Again, the threshold for being perceived as White was higher for Black-White than for Asian-White targets. An independent categorization task in Experiment 3B further confirmed the rule of hypodescent and variation in it that reflected the current racial hierarchy in the United States. These results documenting biases in the social categorization and perception of biracials have implications for resistance to change in the American racial hierarchy.

Fear Extinction to an Out-Group Face The Role of Target Gender

Conditioning studies on humans and other primates show that fear responses acquired toward danger-relevant stimuli, such as snakes, resist extinction, whereas responses toward danger-irrelevant stimuli, such as birds, are more readily extinguished. Similar evolved biases may extend to human groups, as recent research demonstrates that a conditioned fear response to faces of persons of a social out-group resists extinction, whereas fear toward a social in-group is more readily extinguished. Here, we provide an important extension to previous work by demonstrating that this fear-extinction bias occurs solely when the exemplars are male. These results underscore the importance of considering how gender of the target stimulus affects psychological and physiological responses to out-group threat.

You're inferior and not worth our concern: the interface between empathy and social dominance orientation.

OBJECTIVE This project was directed at examination of the potential reciprocal relationship between empathy and social dominance orientation (SDO), with the purpose of testing the predictions from Duckitts highly influential dual process model of prejudice, and further examining the validity of the mere effect view of social dominance orientation. METHOD To examine this relationship, the authors employed cross-lagged structural equation modeling with manifest variables across two studies using large samples from different parts of the world. Study 1 consisted of data from two waves of 389 (83% female) Belgian university students, with each wave separated by 6 months. Study 2 consisted of two waves of data from a national probability sample of 4,466 New Zealand adults (63% female), with each wave separated by a 1-year interval. RESULTS Results supported our expectation of a reciprocal longitudinal relationship between empathy and SDO. Moreover, the results also revealed that SDOs effect on empathy over time tended to be stronger than empathys effect on SDO over time, countering the predictions derived from the dual process model. CONCLUSIONS These results represent the first time the possible reciprocal effects of empathy and SDO on one another have been examined using panel data rather than less appropriate cross-sectional analysis. They suggest the need to reexamine some key assumptions of the dual process model and further question the mere effect view of SDO.

The Space between Us and Them: Perceptions of Status Differences

The current study examines perceived status differences among ethnic groups. Consistent with a group dominance perspective, three samples of American university students revealed that perceived ethnic status differences increased to the extent that individuals had low ethnic status, perceived their society to be unfair, and were lower on social dominance orientation. In addition, social dominance orientation moderated the relationship between perceived status differences and perceived societal fairness such that perceived unfairness was associated with perceived status differences only for those low on social dominance orientation. Discussion suggests that variability in perceived status differences stems from group position, and that understanding the origins of individuals’ perceptions of status differences may be a basic and necessary step to improve intergroup relations.

Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing: SDO Asymmetrically Predicts Perceived Ethnic Victimization Among White and Latino Students Across Three Years

Dominant groups have claimed to be the targets of discrimination on several historical occasions during violent intergroup conflict and genocide.The authors argue that perceptions of ethnic victimization among members of dominant groups express social dominance motives and thus may be recruited for the enforcement of group hierarchy. They examine the antecedents of perceived ethnic victimization among dominants, following 561 college students over 3 years from freshman year to graduation year. Using longitudinal, cross-lagged structural equation modeling, the authors show that social dominance orientation (SDO) positively predicts perceived ethnic victimization among Whites but not among Latinos, whereas victimization does not predict SDO over time. In contrast, ethnic identity and victimization reciprocally predicted each other longitudinally with equal strength among White and Latino students. SDO is not merely a reflection of contextualized social identity concerns but a psychological, relational motivation that undergirds intergroup attitudes across extended periods of time and interacts with the context of group dominance.

Essentialism and Racial Bias Jointly Contribute to the Categorization of Multiracial Individuals

Categorizations of multiracial individuals provide insight into the psychological mechanisms driving social stratification, but few studies have explored the interplay of cognitive and motivational underpinnings of these categorizations. In the present study, we integrated research on racial essentialism (i.e., the belief that race demarcates unobservable and immutable properties) and negativity bias (i.e., the tendency to weigh negative entities more heavily than positive entities) to explain why people might exhibit biases in the categorization of multiracial individuals. As theorized, racial essentialism, both dispositional (Study 1) and experimentally induced (Study 2), led to the categorization of Black-White multiracial individuals as Black, but only among individuals evaluating Black people more negatively than White people. These findings demonstrate how fundamental cognitive and motivational biases interact to influence the categorization of multiracial individuals.

Preserving positive identities: Public and private regard for one's ingroup and susceptibility to stereotype threat

The current study examines the effect of racial regard—feelings of positivity or negativity toward African Americans—on stereotype threat. Forty participants at Harvard University responded to questions concerning their social attitudes and returned later to take a difficult verbal test. This study replicated the well-established stereotype threat effect, and found evidence that both public regard (judgments concerning how others view Blacks) and private regard (how one views Blacks and feels about being Black) moderate the effect. Specifically, Blacks high in public regard and high in private regard appear more susceptible to stereotype threat effects. The article discusses the possibility that African Americans in our study face an additional cognitive burden when confronted with the need to preserve a positive identity.

Hierarchy in the eye of the beholder: (anti-)egalitarianism shapes perceived levels of social inequality.

Debate surrounding the issue of inequality and hierarchy between social groups has become increasingly prominent in recent years. At the same time, individuals disagree about the extent to which inequality between advantaged and disadvantaged groups exists. Whereas prior work has examined the ways in which individuals legitimize (or delegitimize) inequality as a function of their motivations, we consider whether individuals’ orientation toward group-based hierarchy motivates the extent to which they perceive inequality between social groups in the first place. Across 8 studies in both real-world (race, gender, and class) and artificial contexts, and involving members of both advantaged and disadvantaged groups, we show that the more individuals endorse hierarchy between groups, the less they perceive inequality between groups at the top and groups at the bottom. Perceiving less inequality is associated with rejecting egalitarian social policies aimed at reducing it. We show that these differences in hierarchy perception as a function of individuals’ motivational orientation hold even when inequality is depicted abstractly using images, and even when individuals are financially incentivized to accurately report their true perceptions. Using a novel methodology to assess accurate memory of hierarchy, we find that differences may be driven by both antiegalitarians underestimating inequality, and egalitarians overestimating it. In sum, our results identify a novel perceptual bias rooted in individuals’ chronic motivations toward hierarchy-maintenance, with the potential to influence their policy attitudes.