SOCIAL DOMINANCE ORIENTATION (Pratto, Sidanius, Stallworth, & Malle, 1994)

Social Dominance Orientation (SDO), like RWA, is said to be a personality predictor of prejudice. There is evidence that shows heritability of SDO (Kleppesto et al., 2019). Whereas people high in RWA tend to see the world as dangerous and threatening, people high in SDO see the world as a cut-throat competitive place. They hold zero-sum beliefs — that gains for the outgroup is synonymous with loss for the ingroup. Given such, they seek dominance over other groups. Equality is a distance concern for someone high in SDO. Further, they believe that some groups are naturally inferior to other groups and that sometimes it is necessary to “step over” other groups if it helps your group get what it wants.

People high in SDO use legitimizing myths to justify group-based behaviour and status-relations. Legitimizing myths are widely-shared cultural ideologies that provide the moral and/or intellectual justification for group hierarchies. Hierarchy-enhancing legitimizing myths are those that serve group-based hierarchies. These include beliefs such as racism, belief in meritocracy, and the divine right of kings. Ideologies that challenge dominance are known as hierarchy-attenuating legitimizing myths; these seek to promote and justify equality. Examples of hierarchy-attenuating legitimizing myths include universal human rights, social democracy, socialism, and feminism (Pratto, Sidanius, & Levin, 2006).

SDO AND AUTHORITARIANISM – A DUAL PROCESS MODEL

Together, RWA and SDO account for 50% of the variation in our prejudice scores. That is to say, that 50% of the difference between people’s attitudes towards outgroups can be accounted for by differences in the degree to which they are RWA or socially dominant. Indeed, people who are paradoxically high on both RWA and SDO have been shown to be particularly ethnocentric (Altemeyer, 2004).

Duckitt, Wagner, du Plessis, and Birum (2002) found concrete evidence for the different motivational states behind the prejudice of authoritarians and those who are socially dominant. They found that social conformity was positively correlated with a view that the world was dangerous. A view of the world as dangerous was positively associated with authoritarianism which, itself, was positively associated with Nationalism and outgroup prejudice. Social conformity, on the other hand, was negatively correlated with tough mindedness. Tough mindedness was positively correlated with a competitive worldview which, itself, was positively associated with SDO. SDO was, in turn, associated with Nationalism and outgroup prejudice. This integrated dual-process model shows how different world views (dangerous vs. competitive) give rise to authoritarian and socially dominant personalities.

It should be noted here, that SDO and authoritarianism have both been explained in terms of the “prejudiced personality”. Sibley and Duckitt (2008) found that there are significant, cross-cultural correlations between SDO / RWA and personality structures (as identified by the Big 5). Low openness to new experiences and conscientiousness were associated with authoritarianism. Low agreeableness and low to openness to new experiences were associated with social dominance orientation. This lends some support to SDO and authoritarianism being personality constructs. There is reason, however, to suggest that these variables are also influenced by social schemas and respond to social fluctuations of these variables. For instance, Perry, Sibley, and Duckitt (2013) found that a competitive world view was meta-analytically associated with SDO whereas dangerous worldview was meta-analytically associated with RWA. Thus, SDO and RWA also, to some extent, reflect attitudinal variables that are liable to change. We’ll discuss this a little more during class.