Abstract
Social dominance orientation (SDO) and right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) are ideological attitudes that predict lower concern for the environment and less willingness to act on climate change. Research generally shows that SDO and RWA exhibit moderate, negative relationships with environmentalism. We examine the longitudinal influence of SDO and RWA on people’s willingness to change their behaviour to benefit the environment in a national probability sample over five years. We show that both ideological attitudes relate to lower environmentalism across time and that the SDO effect was stronger than the RWA effect, yet the association from environmentalism to later endorsement of SDO is stronger than the reverse. Interestingly, these findings suggest that the more likely temporal association flows from environmentalism to SDO.
Highlights
Research on the psychological foundations of climate change denial have highlighted the important role of two ideological attitudes: Social dominance orientation (SDO) and rightwing authoritarianism (RWA)
The influence of social dominance orientation and right-wing authoritarianism on environmentalism correlate. These findings suggest that perhaps the RWA–environmentalism relationship is driven by the Authoritarian tie with SDO
These results indicate a bidirectional association between ideology and environmentalism over time: SDO and RWA predict change in willingness to sacrifice for the environment, and vice versa
Summary
Research on the psychological foundations of climate change denial have highlighted the important role of two ideological attitudes: Social dominance orientation (SDO) and rightwing authoritarianism (RWA). People who endorse SDO want society to be structured hierarchically, with some groups at the top dominating over ‘lower status’ social groups, who are relegated to the bottom of the social hierarchy [1]. SDO and RWA were initially developed to help explain attitudes towards social groups, with both Social Dominants and Authoritarians showing a preference for groups of people similar to themselves, and hostility towards those who are different [3]. Social Dominants are more likely to oppose environmental policies [4], support environmental exploitation [5, 6], and deny climate change and its human causes [7,8,9,10,11]
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