Jennifer Sheehy-Skeffington

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.

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.

“Not One of Us” Predictors and Consequences of Denying Ingroup Characteristics to Ambiguous Targets

We investigated individual difference predictors of ascribing ingroup characteristics to negative and positive ambiguous targets. Studies 1 and 2 investigated events involving negative targets whose status as racial (Tsarnaev brothers) or national (Woolwich attackers) ingroup members remained ambiguous. Immediately following the attacks, we presented White Americans and British individuals with the suspects’ images. Those higher in social dominance orientation (SDO) and right-wing authoritarianism (RWA)—concerned with enforcing status boundaries and adherence to ingroup norms, respectively—perceived these low status and low conformity suspects as looking less White and less British, thus denying them ingroup characteristics. Perceiving suspects in more exclusionary terms increased support for treating them harshly, and for militaristic counter-terrorism policies prioritizing ingroup safety over outgroup harm. Studies 3 and 4 experimentally manipulated a racially ambiguous target’s status and conformity. Results suggested that target status and conformity critically influence SDO’s (status) and RWA’s (conformity) effects on inclusionary versus exclusionary perceptions.

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.

Social Dominance Theory: Explorations in the Psychology of Oppression

Question: What is the difference between capitalism and communism? Answer: Under capitalism you have the exploitation of man by man. Under communism it is just the reverse. Russian saying Despite impressive gains in the spread of quasi-democratic social practices and respect for human rights witnessed in the past hundred years (e.g., Pinker, 2011), intergroup discrimination, oppression, and violence continue to thrive within every modern social system. Whether one considers the marked discrimination against immigrants in the relatively egalitarian Sweden (Nordenstam & Ringstrom, 2013; Orange, 2013), the money-dominated elections of post-industrial states (Lessig, 2011), or the unambiguously oppressive dictatorships across the majority of the Arab world, systems of group-based social inequality and domination continue, despite our best efforts, to maintain their grip around the throats of democratic and egalitarian aspirations. While there are certainly vast differences in the degree of group-based social inequality across social systems, or across historical epochs within any given society, group-based social inequality appears to be a human universal present in all kinds of societies (see, e.g., Bowles, Smith, and Borgerhoff Mulder, 2010), even in hunter-gatherer communities (e.g., Ames, 2007; Arnold, 1993; Kennett, Winterhalder, Bartruff, & Erlandson, 2008). Having made this basic observation of the near ubiquity of group-based social inequality, social dominance theory (SDT; Pratto, Sidanius, Stallworth, & Malle, 1994; Sidanius, 1993; Sidanius & Pratto, 1999) argues that many familiar types of group-based oppression (e.g., racism, sexism, nationalism, classism, religious intolerance, hostility toward the mentally ill) are essentially particular instantiations of a more general process through which dominant groups establish and maintain social, economic, and military supremacy over subordinate groups. Therefore, it is suggested that specific instantiations of oppression across social contexts cannot be comprehensively understood without serious consideration of the dynamic and multileveled forces producing and sustaining the phenomenon of group-based social hierarchy. The Trimorphic Nature of Group-Based Social Hierarchy SDT argues that there are essentially three related, yet qualitatively distinct types of group-based social hierarchy. The first type of hierarchical system is the “age system,” in which those considered to be “adults” have more social, economic, and political power than those considered “juveniles.” While the specific age separating one category in this system from another may vary between societies and within a given society over time, this dichotomy appears to be universal (James & James, 2008).

Individual differences in relational motives? : interact with the political context to produce terrorism and terrorism-support

The psychology of suicide terrorism involves more than simply the psychology of suicide. Individual differences in social dominance orientation (SDO) interact with the socio-structural, political context to produce support for group-based dominance among members of both dominant and subordinate groups. This may help explain why, in one specific context, some people commit and endorse terrorism, whereas others do not.

Shaping the Development of Prejudice: Latent Growth Modeling of the Influence of Social Dominance Orientation on Outgroup Affect in Youth.

Social dominance orientation (SDO) has been theorized as a stable, early-emerging trait influencing outgroup evaluations, a view supported by evidence from cross-sectional and two-wave longitudinal research. Yet, the limitations of identifying causal paths with cross-sectional and two-wave designs are increasingly being acknowledged. This article presents the first use of multi-wave data to test the over-time relationship between SDO and outgroup affect among young people. We use cross-lagged and latent growth modeling (LGM) of a three-wave data set employing Norwegian adolescents (over 2 years, N = 453) and a five-wave data set with American university students (over 4 years, N = 748). Overall, SDO exhibits high temporal rank-order stability and predicts changes in outgroup affect. This research represents the strongest test to date of SDO’s role as a stable trait that influences the development of prejudice, while highlighting LGM as a valuable tool for social and political psychology.