Social Dominance Theory:
Are The Genes Too Tight?
Dana Ward
Pitzer College
(Currently on Leave At
Miyazaki International College)
Paper Presented at the Eighteenth Annual Scientific Meeting
of the International Society of Political Psychology, Washington
D.C., July 4-8, 1995.
Social Dominance Theory:
Are the Genes Too Tight?
Research into the question of gender differences has mushroomed
over the past two decades. Like mushrooms found on the forest
floor, and like much research into differences between races,
some of the research on gender differences has been poisonous.
Stereotypy rather than objectivity has too often been the filter
through which data has been sifted. Consequently, care must be
taken in assessing which data are firmly grounded and which are
merely rooted in centuries, if not millennia, of skewed images
of masculinity and femininity. In this paper, I will suggest
that much of what we take to be differences between males and
females is in fact a function of differences between the
relatively powerful and the relatively powerless. In brief, the
characteristics often attributed to the biology of males and
females are in fact adaptations to power structures.1
The Seed
The vehicle for this discussion is a series of papers and
articles written by Jim Sidanius and various co-authors
reporting research into the political psychology of gender. The
first is "Sex-Related Differences in Socio-Political Ideology"
(1980), written with Bo Ekehammar. The article reports findings
from a survey of 532 Swedish high school students in Stockholm
concerning political and social attitudes. The article's
abstract states: "Despite certain ideological differences
between males and females, the socio-political attitude profiles
and the attitude structures...were quite similar for males and
females." (1980, p. 17.) What attracted the authors' attention,
however, were not the similarities, but "certain ideological
differences" between boys and girls. These differences between
the boys' and girls' socio-political attitudes became the focus
of Sidanius's future research into the political psychology of
gender and will be the focus of this response.
The significance of the findings Sidanius and Ekehammar
reported in 1980 lay in the fact that they contradicted received
wisdom on the issue of gender and ideology up to that point.
Research from the 1950's through the 1970's seemed to show that
women were more, not less, conservative "concerning sexual
issues, political party choice and general attitude[s]" (p. 17.)
Women's greater conservatism was thought to be a function of
age, since women live longer, and when age is held constant
ideological differences tend to disappear. In the Sidanius and
Ekehammar study, however, there was no difference in terms of
political party choice but females were less conservative than
males in their general political outlook, and "less racist,
pro-western, punitive and more religious and egalitarian than
males." (1980, p. 17.) In short, Sidanius and Ekehammar
identified a set of attitudes about which males and females
seemed to differ in a systematic way:
"Our results indicate that females do not have more
conservative political party preferences but rather tend to have
more left-wing political party preferences as compared with men.
[although not a statistically significant difference.] Women
seem to be less generally conservative, less racist, less
punitive and...more egalitarian and tolerant than men." (p. 23.)
The differences identified in the last sentence of the above
quotation eventually led Sidanius to test the theory that men
exhibit greater "group dominance" than women.
Plausible Roots
Before turning to the articles testing group dominance theory,
it is instructive to review the four principal "schools" of
thought the authors identified as possible explanations of "the
sources of divergent political styles of men and women:" the
political socialization school, the situational school, the
structural school and the biological school. (1980, p. 18.)
1) The political socialization school holds that observed
differences between males and females are a function of early
childhood modeling of adult behavior. According to this school,
sex-appropriate behavior is rewarded, inappropriate behavior
punished, and thus children learn which domains are "male" and
which "female", e.g., the kitchen "belongs" to women, politics
"belong" to men. Differential levels of political knowledge,
participation, and ideology are the result.
2) According to the situational school the lack of political
interest, activity and knowledge exhibited by women compared to
men is the result of different life experiences. Women are
burdened with child care and domestic responsibilities, leaving
little time for outside interests such as politics. Men, in
contrast, are exposed to socio-political stimuli in their daily
routines which arouse more interest in politics, a greater
likelihood to participate actively in politics and greater
political knowledge. Presumably, as the gendered division of
labor breaks down, the observed differences should disappear.
3) The structural school regards the observed differences
between men and women as a function of power conflicts. Some
conflicts involve men and women on opposite sides of a struggle,
other conflicts are merely a function of class struggles with
women viewed as sources of cheap labor and uncritical consumers
due to lower levels of education among women.
4) Finally, the biological viewpoint holds that the political
differences between men and women are biologically determined.
Differences in activity for example are explained by different
levels of androgens in the blood. Testosterone leads men to be
more aggressive and assertive, thus more attracted to political
battles where they can joust for power and status. The authors
cite the work of Dearden (1974) as exemplary of this model:
..."it is the higher levels of testosterone in men which lead
to higher levels of male aggressiveness and assertiveness. The
greater aggressiveness and assertiveness of males as compared to
females has...direct implications concerning differential levels
of political involvement and certain differences in political
ideology between men and women." (1980, p. 19.)
Pruning
Which model, then, did Sidanius and Ekehammar regard as the
best platform from which to view their findings that women were
less conservative, less racist, less pro-western and less
punitive than men, while at the same time being more religious
and egalitarian than males? The authors rule out the
situational and structural models as being unable to explain the
greater racial and social egalitarianism among women. They
argue that the data do not contradict the socialization model,
but neither do the data confirm the model. Probably because the
subjects' educational level was the same, the authors argue, the
political socialization model's predicted greater conservatism
among women did not manifest itself. The status of the
socialization model is left open, but the data do not support
the model's predictions. The only model left standing on its
own, in the authors' view, is the biological model: "...none of
the evidence we have found here is in any way incongruent with
the assumptions of the biological model." (1980, p. 25.) The
authors point out that the political socialization model is not
incompatible with the biological model and that they may well
work together, but the only unscathed model is the biological
model.
The Fruit
A decade and a half after identifying these differences
Sidanius and several colleagues returned to the issue, this time
in the context of social dominance theory. (Pratto, Sidanius, &
Stallworth, 1993; Pratto, Sidanius, Stallworth, & Malle, 1993;
Sidanius1993a; 1993b; Sidanius, Cling, & Pratto 1991; Sidanius
and Pratto 1993; Sidanius, Pratto, Martin & Stallworth 1991.)
The two most recent studies (Sidanius, Pratto and Bobo 1994, and
Sidanius, Pratto, & Brief, 1994) will serve as the basis for
this critique. Sidanius, Pratto and Bobo (1994) analyzed data
collected in 1992 from 1,897 randomly selected adults in Los
Angeles County. The study sought to test social dominance
theory. Sidanius and his colleagues argue that their conception
of social dominance orientation (SDO) is "similar to Eisler and
Loye's (1983) ranking-versus-linking2 distinction and Rokeach's
(1979) concept of equality as a generalized social value. They
define SDO as: "The degree to which people: (a) desire to have
their own ingroup dominate and be superior to generalized
outgroups, and (b) support generalized hierarchical
relationships among groups in society" (Sidanius, Pratto &
Brief, 1994, p. 5.) and "(c) a view of the world where social
groups are engaged in zero-sum conflict over social value."
(Sidanius, Pratto & Bobo, p. 1007.) The authors hypothesize
that males should have a higher average level of SDO than women
after all "cultural, situational, and environmental factors are
considered." (Sidanius, Pratto & Bobo, 1994, p.1000) They
describe this proposition as the "invariance hypothesis" and
present the "weak" and "strong" versions which they test,
reporting results in the various articles mentioned. The strong
version holds that not only are men more likely than women to
express a social dominance orientation, but that the size of the
difference in expression should be invariant across cultures. In
the weak version, men are still more likely than women to
express a social dominance orientation, but there is
considerable cross cultural variation in the gap between men's
and women's social dominance orientation.
Sidanius, Pratto and Bobo (1994) "confirmed the notion that
men have significantly higher social dominance scores than women
and that these differences were consistent across cultural,3
demographic, and situation factors..." (p. 998.) Of what, then,
does that confirmation consist? While it is true that the
authors found statistically significant differences between
males' and females' SDO scores, the difference could hardly be
called "significant" in the more ordinary sense of the term. In
the authors own words, "The mean effect size for sex-gender was
indeed small (.07)." (1994, p.1009.) Although earlier in the
article SDO is linked to war, capitalism and a number of other
major political behaviors, all the authors claim in the end is
that if this difference is upheld by other research teams, the
difference will be important in terms of "helping us to choose
among various explanatory paradigms." (p. 1009.) The main
thrust of my criticisms in this paper is the way in which this
very small difference is interpreted and the way it is linked to
very "large" political behaviors.
Roots Re-potted
In the article's summary, Sidanius and his colleagues return
to the question of what kind of model will explain their
findings. They again caution the reader that they are really
only concerned with the two hypotheses on higher male SDO and
the invariance across cultures, but raise the broader issue of
what determines SDO merely as an elaborative speculation. In
the recent articles, three broad determinants of SDO are
considered, including the cultural-deterministic (CD) model, the
biological-deterministic (BD) model, and the biocultural
interactionism (BCI) model (see Sidanius, Cling, & Pratto,
1991). The CD model attributes the observed gender differences
in SDO to social, cultural and other environmental factors. The
biological-deterministic model is essentially the same as that
articulated in the Sidanius and Ekehammar article in which
genetically determined mixes of hormones and the like stimulate
particular patterns of behavior. The BCI model is an
interaction between culture and biology. The BCI model is now
the preferred model to explain SDO. The BCI perspective
"suggests that the traditionally assumed dichotomy between
'nature' and 'nurture is nonsensical; instead what are normally
regarded as strictly 'cultural' and 'genetic' factors are
neither strictly cultural nor genetic." (Sidanius, Pratto, &
Bobo, 1994, p. 1000.) In the summary the authors state that CD
explanations are "clearly possible (p. 1009.), but indicate
their cautious preference for the BCI model.
More Fruit
Turning now to "Group Dominance and the Political Psychology
of Gender: A Cross-Cultural Comparison" (1994), Jim Sidanius,
Felicia Pratto and Diana Brief continue the argument that men
are more likely than women to express a group dominance
orientation. The authors claim that most research on this issue
points to support for the strong version and cite studies of
racism which show that regardless of ideology or ethnicity, men
were consistently more racist than women and by about the same
amount. All the studies cited, however, were conducted within a
single country, so the authors set out to conduct a cross
cultural test of the SDO hypothesis, drawing subjects from
Australia, Sweden, the United States, and the former Soviet
Union. Although there was no direct SDO measure the authors
patched together a set of items that the authors believe "comes
very close to embracing the central construct of SD {social
dominance} theory." (p. 9.) The items selected were (a) white
superiority, (b) racial equality, (c) mixed marriage, (d)
increased social equality, and (e) social equality. Together
the items create a construct labeled "group dominance
orientation" (GDO).
The results of the study did not confirm the strong versions
of SDO, but did confirm the weak version. That is, men
consistently expressed more social dominance than women, but the
degree of difference was not constant across the countries
sampled. In statistical terms, there was an interaction, albeit
small, between gender and nationality. The "strongest
interaction effects were associated with American females (M =
.12) and Swedish males (M = .11), both of whom were more
group-dominance oriented than either their nationality or sex
would lead one to expect." (p. 12.) Interestingly, "across all
four national samples, males appeared to be more heterogeneous
(e.a.) in their GDO scores than females." (p. 13). The authors
also found that even though males were more heterogeneous than
their co-national females, males did not appear to differ across
nationalities, while females were more homogeneous within a
particular nation, but more variable across nationality (i.e.,
men's GDO scores varied across a wider range than the more
compactly arrayed female GDO scores, and from country to
country, the degree of homogeneity among women's GDO scores
changed). These findings on heterogeneity and variable degrees
of homogeneity will become important to the critique which
follows.
The Challenge
The authors close their study by noting that "Once social
scientists begin to converge upon a theoretically coherent and
valid explanation of mean gender differences with respect to
characteristics such as xenophobia, outgroup aggression and
group dominance, we will probably gain a better understanding of
these heterogeneity differences as well." (p. 18.) I shall
turn, then, to that project as I evaluate the body of research
Sidanius and his colleagues have produced. The main thrust of
my critique is that the early version of the BD model is wholly
inadequate and unsupported by subsequent research and that the
BCI model is only slightly less inadequate. The observed
differences between men and women are not nearly as robust and
consistent as the authors hold and what differences that do
exist are wholly explainable without recourse to genes and
hormones. The observed differences are adaptations to power
structures and I will suggest that the cause behind the greater
heterogeneity in male GDO scores is that men experience a much
wider array of power situations within any given country than
women, and that the cross national variability among women is
accounted for by the relative progress women have made in each
country toward equal power sharing with men.
Weedings
An issue that keeps reappearing in this set of articles is the
question of the root determinants of SDO/GDO. The reader is
always admonished to remember that the focus should be on the
empirical findings, not the theoretical ruminations, but those
ruminations generally occupy significant space in the articles.
Just as consistently, the authors lean toward biologically
oriented explanations of the root cause of higher male SDO. The
schools of thought, models and/or theories put forth are usually
thumb nail sketches (as is appropriate for journal articles
reporting empirical research) so I may be missing some of the
subtlety of the authors' biological model in this response, but
it seems that the authors are relying more on stereotypes of
male-female biological differences than they are on the state of
biological research into these issues, as I shall soon
demonstrate. Returning to the early study by Sidanius and
Ekehammar (1980), the authors' ready embrace of the biological
model troubled this reader for several reasons. First, the
situational and structural models were ruled out because they
could not explain the greater racial and social egalitarianism
among women, but by the same token the biological model can not
explain women's more religious beliefs,4 yet the model is
retained. Second, none of the models were spelled out in any
detail, nor specified in such a way as to pit one model against
another to determine which explains the data better, so any
judgment of the adequacy of models is purely speculative as the
authors admitted later in the conclusion: "...it has not been
our intention to conduct any formal 'test' of explanatory
models." (p. 25) What is troubling is that given the lack of a
formal test and the very cursory explication each model
receives, the basis for choosing any model can only be the
authors' pre-conceived notions of which model is best. These
pre-conceived notions are then presented in the article dressed
as tentative conclusions. In later articles, the "conclusions"
are folded into the "etiology" of social dominance orientations
(Sidanius, Pratto & Bobo, 1994, p.999-1000.)
Equally troubling is that when the authors introduced the
biological model, they linked it to what today we might refer to
as male "testosterone poisoning" on the one hand, and female
nurturance and tendermindedness on the other. These concepts
are so riddled with stereotypes and so poorly sustained by
research (see below), that one must keep in mind that the
research reported in this article belongs to a previous era of
research on gender differences. That is not the case, however
with the data Sidanius and his colleagues have collected more
recently which are interpreted in a similar manner to the data
reported in 1980.
The biocultural interaction (BCI) model now preferred by the
social dominance theorists is really little more than a
combination of the socialization model and the biological model
presented in the 1980 article. Biological drives produce
behaviors which are then modified by social forces and over the
course of evolution humans adapted not only to the physical
environment but to the social environment: "genetic encoding
and heritability do not merely reflect long-range adaptation to
the physical environment (e.g., climate, food supply and microbe
environment) but adaptation to the social environment as well."
(Sidanius, Pratto & Bobo, 1994, p.1000.) The authors continue,
"Therefore, to the extent that male out-group aggression is
influenced by genetic encoding, this genetic encoding can also
be seen as being partially influenced by 'social norms.'"
(p.1000) What the authors seem to mean is because it is in
their genes (handed down from our primate ancestors' behavior?),
men will go about forming groups attempting to dominate other
groups to the degree socially defined norms limit that behavior.
In other words, genes cause the behavior, cultures modify the
behavior, evolution incorporates the modifications into our
genes, and so on in a cycle. Over the course of evolution
social forces have limited SDO such that there is now a
difference between men and women, but the difference is "small".
This version of evolution and the role dominance and biology
play in human behavior can not be sustained. Whatever drives we
have inherited from our early ancestors, those drives are
filtered by our higher neural processes before they are acted
upon. What humans, be they men or women, have inherited is a
potential to engage in aggressive, violent, dominating behaviors
among a wide array of other potential behaviors. There is
nothing in our neurophysiology that compels us to perform any
particular social behavior. Our behavior is conditioned by
processes of learning and socialization. That process is an
interaction between the organism and the environment, but the
interaction is of a much different kind than that Sidanius and
his colleagues have portrayed. There is no gene or set of genes
carried by males which cause them to be more social dominance
oriented than females. SDO is a cultural artifact, not a
biological one. The behavior has been culturally inherited, not
biologically determined be it directly or in interaction with an
environment. Cultures have selected various combinations of
behaviors to reinforce or discourage from a much wider array of
potential human behaviors present in any single culture.
Re-Tilling
Perhaps the most relevant issue for the SDO theory, is the
extent to which men are found to be more aggressive than women,
for in the early versions it was the higher levels of
testosterone that caused men to be more aggressive, more
war-like, more politically and socially engaged, and more
dominance oriented than women. What then, is the status of
research on these issues? Recent research on testosterone
clearly invalidates the "testosterone poisoning" theories
concerning supposed differential rates with which men and women
behave aggressively. Anne Fausto Sterling is only one among
many who have deflated the
"myth of testosterone--often named as the root cause of war,
riots, murder, bar brawls, corporate takeovers, wife beating,
clear-cutting, and other forms of 'male'
aggression--demonstrating that no credible evidence indicates
that testosterone causes aggression. In fact, studies of
soldiers preparing for battle in Vietnam suggest that
testosterone levels actually drop severely in anticipation of
stressful situations." (Dunne, 1994)
This June, at the annual meeting of the Endocrine Society,
"researchers said that it was a deficiency of testosterone,
rather than any excess, that could lead to all the negative
behaviors normally associated with the androgen." (New York
Times Fax, June 20, 1995, p. 3) While this report leaves open
the possibility of a biological model explaining the behaviors,
it is a model not driven by testosterone. Furthermore, the
production of hormones seems directly linked to particular
situations. If this is the kind of interactionism the authors
envision, there is no reason to believe men are more driven
toward social dominance than women except to the extent men are
faced with situations producing differential hormonal levels.
Women faced with similar situations would react in similar ways.
Over the course of a lifetime responding to different sets of
situations, men may well express more SDO than women, but it is
a process of learning and socialization, not a pecking order
preference among men produced by genes. Given what we know at
this point about aggressive behavior, it is unlikely that
anything but a learning model will explain the supposed
differences between men and women on the expression of
aggression and, likewise, SDO.
The research on aggression is particularly instructive since
aggression is often viewed as a "biologically" driven behavior
and a behavior engaged in at different rates by men and women.
The most extreme form of group aggression is, of course, war,
and support for war is referred to in the various articles by
Sidanius and his colleagues as one of the behavioral differences
between men and women possibly produced by SDO (Sidanius, Pratto
& Bobo, p. 999.) The tendency toward aggressive behavior is
also very likely to be directly related to SDO. That is, highly
aggressive individuals are also likely to be highly social
dominance oriented. What, then, is the status of research on
aggression, war, and violence, and in particular what is the
evidence of gender differences in these behaviors?
Geneticist Anne Fausto Sterling and Biologist Ruth Hubbard are
two of the most prominent women researchers skeptical of BD
models of gender differences. (Sterling, 1993a, 1993b, Hubbard
and Wald, 1993. See also, Campbell, 1993.) Not only does
Hubbard's and Sterling's work show that men are not inherently
more aggressive than women, it has become quite clear that
aggression is not the product of higher testosterone levels in
men and is in fact a learned behavior, not a biologically
determined behavior. Many social scientists examining
aggressive behavior have also found that supposed differences
between males and females on the expression of aggression
evaporate on closer examination. Men and women have found
perhaps different culturally determined ways of expressing
aggression, but the rate of expression is quite similar. To
give but one provocative example of an important area involving
aggressive behavior, the National Crime Victimization Survey,
conducted by the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics shows that 54
per cent of all "severe" domestic violence is committed by
women. (U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1995.)
Perhaps the best review of the issue of aggression and social
behavior took place in 1986 when twenty internationally renowned
behavioral scientists held a conference in Seville, Spain. The
purpose of the conference was to assess that status of research
on violence. Their findings are reported in Aggression and War
(1989), edited by Jo Groebel and Robert Hinde, and are
summarized in the Seville Statement on Violence which has been
endorsed by several professional associations including the
American Psychology Association and the American Anthropology
Association. The Seville Statement merits lengthy quotation
since it bears directly on the BCI interpretation Sidanius and
his co-authors have argued explains their findings on SDO.
"It is Scientifically incorrect to say that
we have inherited a tendency to make war
from our animal ancestors...The fact that
warfare has changed so rapidly over time
indicates that it is a product of culture.
Its biological connection is primarily
through language which makes possible the
coordination of groups, the transmission of
technology, and the use of tools.
"It is scientifically incorrect to say that
war or any other violent behavior is
genetically programmed into our human
nature....While genes are co-involved [along
with environments] in establishing our
behavioral capacities, they do not
themselves specify the outcome.
"It is scientifically incorrect to say that
in the course of human evolution there has
been a selection for aggressive behavior
more than for other kinds of behavior. In
all well-studied species, status within the
group is achieved by the ability to
cooperate and to fulfill social functions
relevant to the structure of that
group...Violence is neither in our
evolutionary legacy nor in our genes.
"It is scientifically incorrect to say that
humans have a 'violent' brain'...How we act
is shaped by how we have been conditioned
and socialized. There is nothing in our
neurophysiology that compels us to react
violently." (Groebel & Hinde, 1989.)
The main thrust of the findings from the Seville conference
is that aggression is a learned behavior. Genes merely provide
a wide range of possible behaviors and processes of
socialization determine which behaviors will be expressed. In
the BCI version of Sidanius and his colleagues, it seems to be
the genes which determine greater male SDO regardless of
environment. Theirs is a model that sounds similar to, but is
in fact quite different from, the interactionist models
represented in the work of the Seville scientists and the work
of Sterling, Hubbard and others. In contradiction to the
Seville statement that, "While genes are co-involved in
establishing our behavioral capacities, they do not themselves
specify the outcome," in Sidanius, et al.'s version of BCI,
there is a specific outcome: men are always higher on SDO.
While it is true that Sidanius's research has so far upheld the
theory that men are always higher on SDO, the differences are
rather slight, all the research has been done in societies which
are composed predominantly of populations of European decent,
all the research is confined to survey methodologies (often with
patchwork indexes), and, the research designs leave no reason to
believe that biology is in any way the source of this
invariance. Certainly, our biological endowment makes the
behavior possible, but it does not make higher SDO among males
inevitable. Furthermore, as with many other areas of gender
difference research, initial findings of behavioral gender
difference may well fade as other research teams, methodologies,
and subject pools are added to the debate.
Other Gender Differences
The 1994 article by Sidanius, Pratto and Bobo opens by citing
a number of studies that the authors describe as providing
evidence of "real and robust" differences between men's and
women's behavior and attitudes. While the studies cited do show
some gender differences on issues such as sex-role expectations,
self-esteem, self-concept and so forth, there have been several
important literature reviews in the past decade that show
research on gender differences to provide anything but "real and
robust" evidence. Indeed, the most systematic approaches have
all uniformly found that presumed gender differences are erased
upon closer scrutiny of data. For example, K. Deux (1984)
looked at a decade of research on gender differences and found
only four areas in which there are reliable behavioral
differences between men and women, and in each case gender
explains less than five percent of the variance, usually closer
to one percent: spatial relations, mathematics, verbal fluency,
and aggression. Furthermore, the differences found have been
narrowing in more recent studies, in some cases to the
disappearing point. Indeed, biologist Ruth Hubbard and
geneticist Anne Fausto Sterling argue that even the differences
Deux 's review supported can not be sustained. Sterling's work
"debunks claims that physiological differences exist in male and
female brains, and that females have better verbal abilities,
worse visual-spatial abilities, and less capacity for
mathematics than males." (Dunne, 1994.) Cynthia Fuchs Epstein
(1988) took an even more comprehensive look at the research on
gender differences than Deux and also found the evidence
anything but "real and robust", indeed titling her book
Deceptive Distinctions. More recently, the research on
differences in self-esteem between men and women was subject to
a devastating critique by Christian Hoff Sommers (1994). My own
review (1994) of gender differences in moral reasoning looked at
exactly the two general orientations Sidanius describes as
"male" and "female" as applied in the realm of moral reasoning
and found no differences between men and women in terms of level
of moral reasoning or frequency with which the "ranking"
(justice) or "connecting" (caring) orientation is used by men
and women. In short, just as the research on race differences
causes an initial stir when reports of differences are
circulated followed by the evaporation of those differences when
brought under closer scrutiny, I see no reason to believe SDO
will not suffer the same fate.
Replanting
Social Dominance Theory, stripped of the distracting issue
of biologically rooted gender differences, is still an important
contribution to political psychology. A constellation of
beliefs and behaviors have been identified that seem to cluster
with some consistency. If the roots of SDO are not in biology,
what alternative explanation might suffice? A hint can be found
in the heterogeneity and homogeneity findings mentioned above
(p. 6). Sidanius, Pratto and Brief (1994) report that males' GDO
scores are more heterogeneous than their co-national females,
but men's level of heterogeneity does not appear to differ
across nationalities. In contrast, women's GDO scores are more
homogeneous than their co-national males' scores, but their GDO
scores were not homogeneous across nationality. (1994, pp.
13-14.) If SDO/GDO had its roots in adaptive mechanisms
commonly associated with inequalities of power, the variability
findings could be explained in terms of the differential power
experiences of men and women across various societies. In any
given society in which there are gender based maldistributions
of power, the relatively more empowered gender will have a wider
distribution of power experiences than the disadvantaged gender.
Thus, in the overwhelming majority of societies men will have a
wider array of power experiences than women. There still will
be a significant number of men whose experience of relative
powerlessness equals women's experience, but far fewer women
whose experience of power will be equal to that of the powerful
men. Hence, if SDO is related to adaptive mechanisms in
response to power, the range of adaptations will be greater for
men than for women, producing greater heterogeneity in SDO
scores for men, more homogeneous scores for women. Cross
culturally, men's scores should show greater homogeneity since
the breadth of power experiences will be similar, but women in
different cultures have made differing advances toward power
equality with men and hence there should be greater
heterogeneity in cross cultural comparisons of women's SDO
scores than men's. An interesting test of this proposition
would be to compare scores in terms of heterogeneity and
homogeneity from within different class experiences in the same
culture and across different cultures in the same relative
class.
It is often the case that those on the subordinate side of a
power relationship have a tendency to take on the point of view
of those in power, or at least what is perceived to be the point
of view of those in power. This is an adaptive mechanism that
protects those in subordinant positions from experiencing the
sanctions of authority. Mannoni wrote of this tendency in terms
of colonialism in Prospero and Caliban, Piaget's concept
of unilateral respect for authority similarly describes the
child's response to the inequality between parent and child, and
Lukes and Gaventa have spoken of the "third face of power" in
much the same way. This might help explain why SDO scores
decrease as social class increases. That is, an acceptance of
hierarchy among those on the bottom can be seen as a defense
mechanism dampening the potential for conflict. Likewise, the
tendency to externalize and blame outgroups for one's
subordination could lead those in such positions to adopt a
punitive attitude toward outgroups and hence greater SDO among
subordinated groups.
This is not to say identification with the aggressor and
externalization are the only responses to subordination.
Another form of adaptation to experiences of subordination is to
strengthen internal group bonds and to undermine the dominant
hierarchy by promoting egalitarian social values. If in
response to subordination men are more likely to identify with
the aggressor and externalize, and women are more likely to
strengthen group bonds and promote egalitarianism, this might be
because the division of labor in most societies has removed men
from their families for extended periods of the day, season or
year, giving boys less well grounded models of masculinity, thus
weakening ego integrity which could produce the characteristics
associated with SDO.
The preceding two paragraphs have merely been an attempt to
provide a plausible explanation of the SDO findings that is not
dependent upon BD or BCI assumptions. The conclusion to be
drawn from these comments, then, is that Sidanius and his
colleagues have tried to stuff too much into our genes. The
result is that Social Dominance Theory's genes chafe.
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Footnotes
1) I shall elide two conundrums raised in the opening paragraph;
the first being the issue of whether or not "objectivity" is a
"male" icon (an issue that seems to be the concern almost
exclusively of American "gender" feminists) and the second being
the question of whether or not power hierarchies are "male"
rather than human inventions. My position on the objectivity
issue is that objectivity is socially constructed, but that it
is a useful construct that can never be achieved, merely
approached, and is neither male nor female. Power hierarchies,
in my view, are human inventions found in both male and female
social organizations.
2) The continuum is strikingly similar to Gilligan's care and
justice orientations which she argues is also associated with
gender differences, about which more will be said later.
3)It should be pointed out that while the article purports to be
"cross cultural", all the data was collected in a single U.S.
county. The subjects included a large number of immigrants from
47 different countries or territories, but they all share
immigrant status. That is, each left behind, for whatever
reason, their native culture and made lives in another country.
They all share, therefore an immigrant subculture, which means
the invariance thesis really has not been fully tested in this
study.
4)The authors make a passing reference to all four models being
able to predict greater religious attitudes for females than
males, but the assertion is not elaborated upon. I frankly can
not imagine a genuinely biological argument that would predict
greater religiosity for women.