Questions: Social Dominance Orientation and Hierarchy Preference

Question 1

A researcher finds that high-SDO individuals show strong prejudice toward homeless people and recent immigrants, but show less prejudice than high-RWA individuals toward gay men and conservative religious minorities. What best explains this pattern?

• A. SDO is only activated by economic competition, making it irrelevant to non-economic targets
• B. SDO individuals target groups perceived as low-status, while RWA individuals target groups seen as violating conventional norms — and gay men and religious minorities are more salient as norm violators than as low-status groups
• C. The SDO scale is psychometrically biased against detecting prejudice toward LGBTQ groups
• D. High-SDO individuals have undergone more diversity training that reduces certain types of explicit prejudice

Answer: (B)

This divergence is the clearest evidence that SDO and RWA are psychologically distinct constructs. SDO drives prejudice against low-status groups — those occupying subordinate positions in the hierarchy. RWA drives prejudice against deviant groups — those who violate the conventional norms that authority-respecting individuals want enforced. Where these two overlap (e.g., groups who are both low-status and cast as norm-violators), both SDO and RWA compound to produce the strongest prejudice. Where they diverge, the target's profile explains which construct is activated.

Question 2

Which of the following best explains why individuals high in SDO tend to endorse ideologies like ethnonationalism or meritocratic economic theories that justify inequality?

• A. High-SDO individuals are more cognitively rigid and less open to evidence that challenges their existing beliefs
• B. Anxiety about social disorder leads high-SDO individuals to seek simple explanations for inequality
• C. These ideologies function as hierarchy-legitimizing myths — they rationalize the hierarchical arrangements that SDO individuals already prefer, making inequality seem natural or deserved
• D. High-SDO individuals have authoritarian upbringings that instill both hierarchy preference and specific ideological content

Answer: (C)

The mechanism is crucial to understanding SDO: people high in SDO don't start with these ideologies and therefore prefer hierarchy — they prefer hierarchy and therefore selectively seek out and endorse ideologies that rationalize it. Racism, sexism, nationalism, and naturalized economic inequality all function as hierarchy-legitimizing myths. This is distinct from right-wing authoritarianism, where ideological content follows from submission to authority and hostility to norm violators. SDO and RWA predict similar prejudice outcomes through different psychological pathways.

Question 3

Members of dominant social groups tend to score higher in SDO than members of subordinate groups — a pattern that is consistent with SDO theory because hierarchies differentially benefit those at the top.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: True

This finding is both a prediction of SDO theory and empirical support for it. Because SDO is a preference for hierarchy, and because dominant group members benefit most from hierarchical arrangements, they are expected to score higher. Subordinate group members, who face disadvantage from the hierarchy, tend to score lower. This group-level pattern suggests SDO is not merely an individual personality quirk but is embedded in social structure — shaped by one's position within the hierarchy that SDO preferences help maintain.

Question 4

Social dominance orientation (SDO) describes the tendency to passively accept and justify existing social arrangements as fair and legitimate, regardless of whether one personally prefers hierarchy.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: False

This describes system justification theory, not SDO. System justification is about passive acceptance and rationalization of the status quo — a motivated tendency to see existing arrangements as fair. SDO is an active preference for group-based hierarchy itself. The distinction matters: a person can be low in SDO but still show system justification (accepting inequality without preferring it), or high in SDO without showing system justification in every context. SDO predicts generalized support for hierarchy-reinforcing policies and outgroup derogation as a goal, not merely as a byproduct of status quo acceptance.

Question 5

How does SDO produce generalized prejudice across many different outgroups, whereas other forms of prejudice may be more targeted?

Model answer: SDO is a preference for group-based hierarchy itself, not for the subordination of any specific outgroup. Because SDO individuals prefer that some groups sit above others, they will endorse derogation of whatever groups happen to occupy low-status positions in their social context. The mechanism runs through hierarchy-legitimizing myths — SDO individuals selectively adopt ideologies that rationalize existing hierarchies, and those ideologies happen to target many outgroups simultaneously. This is why SDO predicts prejudice against homeless people, ethnic minorities, women, immigrants, and other low-status groups as a package rather than as separate attitudes toward each.

Contrast this with more specific prejudices (e.g., antipathy toward a particular ethnic group rooted in historical conflict) which don't generalize to all low-status outgroups. SDO's generality is its defining feature: it is a preference for the structure of hierarchy, not a belief about any particular group's characteristics. This is why high-SDO individuals often endorse multiple distinct ideologies — each legitimizes a different dimension of the hierarchy they already prefer.