Felicia Pratto

Social Dominance Orientation: A Personality Variable Predicting Social and Political Attitudes

Social dominance orientation (SDO), ones 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 lag 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

Automatic Vigilance: The Attention-Grabbing Power of Negative Social Information

One of the functions of automatic stimulus evaluation is to direct attention toward events that may have undesirable consequences for the perceivers 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.

Social dominance theory and the dynamics of intergroup relations: Taking stock and looking forward

This chapter reviews the last 15 years of research inspired by social dominance theory, a general theory of societal group-based inequality. In doing so, we sketch the broad outlines of the theory and discuss some of the controversies surrounding it, such as the “invariance hypothesis” regarding gender differences in social dominance orientation (SDO) and the effect of social context on the expression of SDO. We also discuss the central role of gender in the construction and maintenance of group-based inequality, and review some of the new research inspired by the social dominance perspective. Finally, we identify and discuss some of the most important theoretical questions posed by social dominance theory that are yet to be researched.

Social Dominance Orientation and the Political Psychology of Gender: A Case of Invariance?

Social dominance theory assumes transsituational and transcultural differences between men and women in social dominance orientation (SDO), with men showing higher levels of SDO than women. SDO is a general individual-difference variable expressing preference for superordinate in-group status, hierarchical relationships between social groups, and a view of group relations as inherently 0-sum. Data from a random sample of 1,897 respondents from Los Angeles County confirmed the notion that men have significantly higher social dominance scores than women and that these differences were consistent across cultural, demographic, and situational factors such as age, social class, religion, educational level, political ideology, ethnicity, racism, region of national origin, and gender-role relevant opinion. The theoretical implications are discussed.

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.

Individual construct accessibility and perceptual selection

Abstract The immediate environmental context in which social events occur and the current processing goals of the perceiver have been found to be important determinants of attentional focus, person memory, and social judgment. However, individuals may bring their own idiosyncratic perceptual sensitivities to bear on the selection of stimuli for further processing. The present experiment was designed to test whether ones chronically accessible social constructs constitute such a long-term perceptual readiness. The Stroop color-naming paradigm was employed to present trait-related adjectives to subjects who were to name the color in which each word was presented as quickly as possible. Subjects were paired according to the accessibility of their constructs for four different trait dimensions (so that one subjects accessible constructs were the other subjects inaccessible constructs, and vice versa). Analyses of color-naming latencies revealed that it took reliably longer for subjects to name the color of adjectives corresponding to their chronically accessible constructs than of those related to their inaccessible constructs. These results are consistent with a model in which stimulus properties relevant to ones accessible constructs receive preferential treatment in the initial automatic analysis of the environment.

Beyond Contact: Intergroup Contact in the Context of Power Relations

This work investigated how group-based power affects the motivations and preferences that members of advantaged and disadvantaged groups bring to situations of contact. To measure the preferred content of interactions, desires to address particular topics in intergroup contact were assessed for both experimental groups (Study 1) and real groups (Study 2). As predicted, across both studies, the desire to talk about power was greater among members of disadvantaged than of advantaged groups. This difference was mediated by motivation for change in group-based power. Study 2 further demonstrated that more highly identified members of disadvantaged groups wanted to talk about power more. Members of advantaged groups generally preferred to talk about commonalities between the groups more than about group-based power, and this desire was greater with higher levels of identification. However, perceiving that their groups advantage was illegitimate increased the desire of advantaged group members to address power in intergroup interactions.

Social Dominance Orientation and the Legitimization of Inequality Across Cultures

The authors tested three hypotheses from social dominance theory in four cultures: (a) that individual differences in social dominance orientation (SDO), or the preference for group-based inequality, can be reliably measured in societies that are group-based hegemonies; (b) that SDO correlates positively with attitudes supporting hegemonic groups and correlates negatively with attitudes supporting oppressed groups; and (c) that men are higher on SDO than women. For the most part, the results confirmed the hypotheses. SDO scales were internally reliable and were administered in English, Chinese, and Hebrew. SDO scores correlated with sexism, measured in culturally appropriate ways, in every culture, and with ethnic prejudice and other attitudes concerning the local hegemony except in China. Men were higher on SDO than women in most samples. Findings are discussed in terms of ideological and psychological facilitators of group dominance.

Social dominance orientation, anti-egalitarianism and the political psychology of gender : an extension and cross-cultural replication

This study explored differences in levels of anti-egalitarianism and social dominance orientation among groups with different social status, and examined the degree to which these differences in anti-egalitarianism varied across a number of situational and contextual factors. Consistent with both the cultural deterministic (CD) and social dominance (SD) paradigms, when defining social status as socioeconomic status, ethnicity, or ‘race’, differences in anti-egalitarianism between members of high- and low-status groups were found to be contingent upon a range of contextual and situational factors, such as the degree to which the two groups varied in social status. However, consistent with the SD perspective and the invariance hypothesis, the data also showed that males were more anti-egalitarian than females, and that this male/female difference in social and group dominance orientation tended to be largely invariant across cultural, situational, and contextual boundaries. Copyright

In-Group Identification, Social Dominance Orientation, and Differential Intergroup Social Allocation

Abstract Three varieties of differential intergroup social allocation were examined in a sample of American students as a function of degree of in-group legitimacy, self-esteem, sex, and social dominance orientation within a standard minimal-groups experimental paradigm. The results are consistent with both social identity theory and much previous research in this area: The greater the in-group identification, the greater the allocation of social value in favor of the in-group. The results are also consistent with the expectations of social dominance theory and show that, even after the effects of gender, self-esteem, and in-group identification were considered, the greater the social dominance orientation, the greater the allocation of social value in favor of the in-group. For two of the three indexes of social value, there was a statistically significant interaction between in-group identification and social dominance orientation. Subjects showing strong acceptance of their in-group classification and ...