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A meta-analysis examined the extent to which socio-stmctural and psycho-cultural characteristics of societies correspond with how much gender and ethnic/racial groups differ on their support of group- based hierarchy. Robustly, women opposed group-based hierarchy more than men did, and members of lower power ethnic/racial groups opposed group-based hierarchy more than members of higher power ethnic/racial groups did. As predicted by social dominance theory, gender differences were larger, more stable, and less variable from sample to sample than differences between ethnic/racial groups. Subordi- nate gender and ethnic/racial group members disagreed more with dominants in their views of group- based hierarchy in societies that can be considered more liberal and modem (e.g., emphasizing individ- ualism and change from traditions), as well as in societies that enjoyed greater gender equality. The relations between gender and ethnic/racial groups are discussed, and implications are developed for social dominance theory, social role theory, biosocial theory, social identity theory, system justification theory, realistic group conflict theory, and relative deprivation theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on theories of intergroup prejudice and decision making, the authors examined how much participants valued lives of conationals and enemy civilians. Using decisions made under risk, Experiment I showed that Americans valued Iraqi and American lives equally when outcomes for those nations did not compete but valued American lives more under outcome competition. Experiments 2 and 3 extended this finding by illustrating ethnocentric valuation even when large numbers of lives were at stake: The number of lives at stake mattered less for enemy civilians than it did for conational combatants. Experiment 4 provided additional evidence of this ethnocentric indifference to magnitude, regardless of combatant status of the conationals' lives. In all experiments, individual difference measures associated with prejudice (e.g., group identification and prejudice, empathy, social dominance orientation, social attitudes) corresponded to ethnocentric valuation measured in decisions. Results demonstrate that categorization, competitive context, and individual propensities for prejudice influence how much one values lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: This research examines the process of conducting and evaluating a music-based HIV prevention intervention among urban adolescents, and is informed by the information, motivation, behavioral skills (IMB) model. Design: Musically talented opinion leaders were recruited to write, record, and distribute HIV prevention themed music to their peers to increase HIV prevention motivation, behavioral skills, and behaviors. In this 3-month field experiment, participants were 306 students enrolled in health classes at each of three large multiracial urban high schools (one treatment school; two control schools). Main Outcome Measures: Measures of HIV prevention information, motivation, behavioral skills, and behaviors, both pre- and postintervention. Results and Conclusion: Results indicate that the intervention influenced several aspects of HIV prevention motivation, behavioral skills, and condom use and HIV testing behaviors. This research demonstrates that the incorporation of music into HIV prevention interventions for adolescents has the potential to be effective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A 2-stage model of the construction of explanations for differences between groups is presented. Category norms affect which of 2 groups becomes "the effect to be explained," and stereotypes shape attributions about that group. In 3 experiments, 288 participants wrote explanations for differences between gay and straight men. Explanations focused on gay men who were also judged to have more mutable attributes. However, these effects were not correlated. Participants focused explanations on straight men when explicitly instructed to do so (Experiment 1). Explanations focused on both groups equally when the gay men constituted the numerically larger sample, when gay men were more typical of the overarching category (i.e., people with AIDS) than straight men, or when more straight men were described as performing the behavior (Experiment 2). Stereotype-consistent information prompted more essentialist references and fewer reconstructive references to gay men than did stereotype-inconsistent information (Experiment 3). The relevance of this model for theories of norms, stereotypes, and for the conduct of social science is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the book "Group Processes and Political Dynamics," edited by Mark F. Ettin, Jay W. Fidler and Bertram D. Cohen. If the actual interplay of persons in groups has been neglected recently in social and political psychology's focus on individual reactions to group stimuli such as issue positions and the minimal groups paradigm, it is central to the work of the group psychotherapists who have authored chapters in this edited volume. Each chapter of the book uses the group psychodynamic approach to examine a particular arena of group conflict, and the mostly contemporary examples hail from each continent. Both editors and authors are to be commended for their terse but in-depth and organized analyses of specific problems in group dynamics. This volume may prove useful as a source of classroom examples for those who teach intergroup relations within political science, sociology, anthropology, and psychology and be a refreshing inspiration for empirically oriented researchers who seek concrete relations to compare against their theories. The first set of eight cases applies group dynamics to political events.

The authors present archival evidence that men disproportionately hold occupational roles that enhance group-based inequality and that women disproportionately hold roles that attenuate group-based inequality. The authors found evidence for 3 processes that may contribute to this pattern: self-selection that is based on gender-linked differences in support for group inequality (social dominance orientation), hiring biases that are based on matching job applicants' group equality values with the hierarchy function of the job, and gender-stereotyped hiring biases. These processes were found across a number of occupations and participant variables. The social systems nature of these processes and the implications of the results for theoretical understandings of gender roles, social inequality, and theories of stereotyping are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using data from 3 different samples, the authors found that: (a) the relationships between political conservatism and racism generally increased as a function of educational sophistication; however, the relationship between political conservatism and anti-Black affect did not increase with educational sophistication. (b) The correlation between political conservatism and racism could be entirely accounted for by their mutual relationship with social dominance orientation. (c) Generally, the net effect of political conservatism, racism, and social dominance orientation on opposition to affirmative action increased with increasing education. These findings contradict much of the case for the principled conservatism hypothesis, which maintains that political values that are largely devoid of racism, especially among highly educated people, are the major source of Whites' opposition to affirmative action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social dominance theory assumes transsituational and transcultural differences between men and women in social dominance orientation (SDO), with men showing higher levels of SDO than women. SDO is a general individual-difference variable expressing preference for superordinate in-group status, hierarchical relationships between social groups, and a view of group relations as inherently 0-sum. Data from a random sample of 1,897 respondents from Los Angeles County confirmed the notion that men have significantly higher social dominance scores than women and that these differences were consistent across cultural, demographic, and situational factors such as age, social class, religion, educational level, political ideology, ethnicity, racism, region of national origin, and gender-role relevant opinion. The theoretical implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social dominance orientation (SDO), one's degree of preference for inequality among social groups, is introduced. On the basis of social dominance theory, it is shown that (a) men are more social dominance-oriented than women, (b) high-SDO people seek hierarchy-enhancing professional roles and low-SDO people seek hierarchy-attenuating roles, (c) SDO was related to beliefs in a large number of social and political ideologies that support group-based hierarchy (e.g., meritocracy and racism) and to support for policies that have implications for intergroup relations (e.g., war, civil rights, and social programs), including new policies. SDO was distinguished from interpersonal dominance, conservatism, and authoritarianism. SDO was negatively correlated with empathy, tolerance, communality, and altruism. The ramifications of SDO in social context are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the functions of automatic stimulus evaluation is to direct attention toward events that may have undesirable consequences for the perceiver's well-being. To test whether attentional resources are automatically directed away from an attended task to undesirable stimuli, Ss named the colors in which desirable and undesirable traits (e.g., honest, sadistic) appeared. Across 3 experiments, color-naming latencies were consistently longer for undesirable traits but did not differ within the desirable and undesirable categories. In Experiment 2, Ss also showed more incidental learning for undesirable traits, as predicted by the automatic vigilance (but not a perceptual defense) hypothesis. In Experiment 3, a diagnosticity (or base-rate) explanation of the vigilance effect was ruled out. The implications for deliberate processing in person perception and stereotyping are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A new conceptualization and measurement of social dominance orientation--individual differences in the preference for group based hierarchy and inequality--is introduced. In contrast to previous measures of social dominance orientation that were designed to be unidimensional, the new measure (SDO?) embeds theoretically grounded subdimensions of SDO--SDO-Dominance (SDO-D) and SDO-Egalitarianism (SDO-E). SDO-D constitutes a preference for systems of group-based dominance in which high status groups forcefully oppress lower status groups. SDO-E constitutes a preference for systems of group-based inequality that are maintained by an interrelated network of subtle hierarchy-enhancing ideologies and social policies. Confirmatory factor and criterion validity analyses confirmed that SDO-D and SDO-E are theoretically distinct and dissociate in terms of the intergroup outcomes they best predict. For the first time, distinct personality and individual difference bases of SDO-D and SDO-E are outlined. We clarify the construct validity of SDO by strictly assessing a preference for dominance hierarchies in general, removing a possible confound relating to support for hierarchy benefitting the ingroup. Consistent with this, results show that among members of a disadvantaged ethnic minority group (African Americans), endorsement of SDO7 is inversely related to ingroup identity. We further demonstrate these effects using nationally representative samples of U.S. Blacks and Whites, documenting the generalizability of these findings. Finally, we introduce and validate a brief 4-item measure of each dimension. This article importantly extends our theoretical understanding of one of the most generative constructs in social psychology, and introduces powerful new tools for its measurement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In contrast to authors of previous single-nation studies, we propose that supporting multiculturalism (MC) or assimilation (AS) is likely to have different effects in different countries, depending on the diversity policy in place in a particular country and the associated norms. A causal model of intergroup attitudes and behaviors, integrating both country-specific factors (attitudes and perceived norms related to a particular diversity policy) and general social-psychological determinants (social dominance orientation), was tested among participants from countries where the pro-diversity policy was independently classified as low, medium, or high (N = 1,232). Results showed that (a) anti-Muslim prejudice was significantly reduced when the pro-diversity policy was high; (b) countries differed strongly in perceived norms related to MC and AS, in ways consistent with the actual diversity policy in each country and regardless of participants' personal attitudes toward MC and AS; (c) as predicted, when these norms were salient, due to subtle priming, structural equation modeling with country included as a variable provided support for the proposed model, suggesting that the effect of country on prejudice can be successfully accounted by it; and (d) consistent with the claim that personal support for MC and AS played a different role in different countries, within-country mediation analyses provided evidence that personal attitudes toward AS mediated the effect of social dominance orientation on prejudice when pro-diversity policy was low, whereas personal attitudes toward MC was the mediator when pro- diversity policy was high. Thus, the critical variables shaping prejudice can vary across nations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fazio, Sanbonmatsu, Powell, and Kardes (1986) demonstrated that Ss were able to evaluate adjectives more quickly when these adjectives were immediately preceded (primed) by attitude objects of similar valence, compared with when these adjectives were primed by attitude objects of opposite valence. Moreover, this effect obtained primarily for attitude objects toward which Ss were presumed to hold highly accessible attitudes, as indexed by evaluation latency. The present research explored the generality of these findings across attitude objects and across procedural variations. The results of 3 experiments indicated that the automatic activation effect is a pervasive and relatively unconditional phenomenon. It appears that most evaluations stored in memory, for social and nonsocial objects alike, become active automatically on the mere presence or mention of the object in the environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A new conceptualization and measurement of social dominance orientation-individual differences in the preference for group based hierarchy and inequality-is introduced. In contrast to previous measures of social dominance orientation that were designed to be unidimensional, the new measure (SDO7) embeds theoretically grounded subdimensions of SDO-SDO-Dominance (SDO-D) and SDO-Egalitarianism (SDO-E). SDO-D constitutes a preference for systems of group-based dominance in which high status groups forcefully oppress lower status groups. SDO-E constitutes a preference for systems of group-based inequality that are maintained by an interrelated network of subtle hierarchy-enhancing ideologies and social policies. Confirmatory factor and criterion validity analyses confirmed that SDO-D and SDO-E are theoretically distinct and dissociate in terms of the intergroup outcomes they best predict. For the first time, distinct personality and individual difference bases of SDO-D and SDO-E are outlined. We clarify the construct validity of SDO by strictly assessing a preference for dominance hierarchies in general, removing a possible confound relating to support for hierarchy benefitting the ingroup. Consistent with this, results show that among members of a disadvantaged ethnic minority group (African Americans), endorsement of SDO7 is inversely related to ingroup identity. We further demonstrate these effects using nationally representative samples of U.S. Blacks and Whites, documenting the generalizability of these findings. Finally, we introduce and validate a brief 4-item measure of each dimension. This article importantly extends our theoretical understanding of one of the most generative constructs in social psychology, and introduces powerful new tools for its measurement., ((c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved).)