social dominance orientation Flashcards
what is SDO?
- describes people that believe in social hierarchy and want their own group to dominate over others
- extent to which individuals embrace ideologies that maintain or amplify hierarchies in society
those with high SDO
- more likely to engage in acts that favour dominant groups, be more accepting of behaviours that discriminate social categories and be more prejudiced towards other collectives. promote discrimination
those with low SDO
- more likely to be empathetic towards minority groups as they don’t want to preserve the policies in society that help prejudice attitudes.
what do social institutions such as financial organisations tend to do?
- distribute desired goods to dominant and powerful collectives disproportionately
- allocate undesirable commodities, such as dangerous work, towards subordinate collectives
what does the 7 point likert scale do?
- assesses SDO
- An example of a question that could be asked is if they believe, “Some groups of people are simply
inferior to other groups”. - correlates with dark personality traits like narcissism, psychopathy
and machiavellianism.
give 2 strengths of SDO
Supporting evidence of researchers that found that white individuals with a high social dominance orientation are more inclined to employ applicants with lighter skin, therefore demonstrating prejudice and wanting to maintain dominance by only offering opportunities to those like them. Therefore, proving that those with SDO personalities are more likely to discriminate and be prejudiced towards certain groups of people.
High in reliability as SDO can be assessed using a 7 point likert scale that has 14 to 16 items that are used to measure SDO. An example statement could be “you think some groups are simply inferior to others”. Therefore SDO is quantitative as it used numerical measurements, making it objective and the results of how high or low someones SDO is is not affected by anyone’s opinion, increasing scientific credibility.
give 2 weaknesses of SDO
Louis et al noted that SDO scales do not include items which are heavily affected by social norms, meaning the role of these factors is ignored in the research. For example, they found that 72% of people strongly disagreed with the statement ‘the white race is the best race’ but agreed with the exclusion of asylum seekers. This suggests it is important to understand the social as well as individual factors causing prejudice.
A 7 point likert scale is used to assess SDO, which is a form of self report data. The ppts may lie whilst answering the questions so they give the answers they believe the researchers are looking for. Therefore, the scale is prone to social desirability bias, meaning the results may not actually be representative of what people actually believe about social hierarchies and how prejudiced their attitudes may be.
alternative explanation
An alternative explanation would be RCT which suggests the mere presence of another group can lead to prejudice. For example, sherif matched 2 groups of boys and made them compete against each other to win a trophy to cause conflict. He found that the competition caused the boys to characterise in group with favourable terms and outgroup with words like “stinkers and sissies” and they became physical. Therefore, showing SDO is a reductionist and narrown explanation and cannot be the sole reason of why prejudice and discrimination occur in society as the boys were the same and their was no hierarchy.
application
Although some people believe SDO is a negative theory due to its focus on
oppression, and the fact that it dooms society to endless oppression and exploitation, it still has a high application to society. It explains why oppression is reinforced by people so it can help decrease it. The theory notes ideologies that reduce hierarchy and those that cause hierarchy. This can help reduce prejudice in society by trying make people more equal.
