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

Abstract

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 © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.