Social Dominance Orientation

Arnold K Ho,Jennifer Sheehy-Skeffington,Nour Kteily,Lotte Thomsen,Shana Levin,Jim Sidanius,Felicia Pratto

doi:10.1177/0146167211432765

Abstract

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.

Highlights

S measured in July 2016 predicted votes in November
Piecing together the American Voting Puzzle: How Voters’ Personalities and Judgments of Issue Importance Mattered in the 2016 Presidential Election Ongoing media discussions of the outcome of the 2016 U.S Presidential election, as well as recent scholarship on U.S electoral politics, has focused on political polarization that is posited to result from differing cultural values about social issues such as LGBTQ rights and abortion
We used the issue ratings from Wave 3 (W3) in the factor analysis, because participants were asked to rate the importance of all issues from 0 to 5 in W3, as opposed to only ranking the top four issues in W1 and Wave 2 (W2)

Summary

Introduction

S measured in July 2016 predicted votes in November. We found that the links between personality and voting were mediated by issue importance. The personality traits that have been examined most frequently in relation to political attitudes and behavior are openness to experience (McCrae, 1996; Curtin, Stewart & Duncan, 2010; Curtin, Stewart & Cole, 2015), social dominance orientation (SDO; Pratto et al, 1994), right-wing authoritarianism (RWA; Crowson, 2009), and nationalism (Crowson, 2009; Mukherjee, Molina & Adams, 2012). While many studies have shown that liberal political attitudes and behaviors are predicted by openness to experience, it is unclear from the literature if voting behavior is a direct extension of this individual difference or if this relation is mediated by engagement with particular liberal issues/causes, which motivates a liberal voting choice.

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