社会支配倾向研究的回顾与展望

社会支配倾向指个体对基于群体产生的等级制度及社会存在不平等现象的偏好程度。高社会支配倾向者认为高能力者应比低能力者获得更多的社会权利与社会资源;低社会支配倾向者认为社会应该按需分配,不存在等级差异。社会支配倾向会对社会阶层、偏见、政治态度、公平等现象的作用产生影响,是这些现象的重要影响因素。今后需要立足于社会支配倾向的本质与社会应用开展整合性研究。

Social Dominance Orientation: Retrospect and Prospect

Social dominance theory (SDT) was developed to understand the formation and development of the social prejudice which is based on social hierarchy. Social dominance orientation (SDO) is the major part of SDT. SDO is the preference of group-based social hierarchy and the unfairness of society, which is the general tendency of human being. According to the studies in the field of SDO, researchers usually drew the conclusion that (1) higher social dominance oriented individuals hold the belief that people with high ability should have more social rights and resources than those whose ability are low, that is, our society is originally unequal; and (2) lower social dominance oriented individuals believe that everyone is equal, and there should be no hierarchy difference. According to social dominance theory, members of dominant arbitrary groups are expected to have higher levels of SDO than members of subordinate groups because they want to sustain the privileged access to social and economic resources which their dominant position affords. Social dominance orientation is one of the most powerful predictors of intergroup attitudes and behavior. Some researchers suggest SDO might consist of two complementary dimensions: SDO-Dominance (SDO-D), or the preference for some groups to dominate others, and SDO-Egalitarianism (SDO-E), which means a preference for no egalitarian intergroup relation. About the nature of SDO is uncertain. Despite of the dimension of SDO, there is still fierce discussion on the question whether SDO is a stable trait or not. The contextualize critique of SDO has centered around two related points. First, these authors argue that SDO behaves differently as a function of the social context in which it is measured. Second, SDO reflected a generalized, abstracted support for group-based hierarchy and it’s a reliable predictor of a wide range of intergroup attitudes across different contexts and domains, including racial and ethnic prejudice and sexism. SDO has been found to be related to a range of hierarchy enhancing ideologies and policies such as prejudice and justice. Research has shown that distinct ideological belief systems, such as political conservatism and racism, are correlated with one another due to a general desire for group-based dominance. Many social factors such as social hierarchy, prejudice, political attitude and fairness can be affected by SDO strongly. According to SDO, hierarchy enhancing (HE) power and hierarchy attenuation (HA) power affect the human social system together. HE aims at form and maintenance the unfairness of society while HA aims at making the society fair. Based on these two concepts, studies on these four topics which affect human social life greatly have been discussed and summarized in order to reveal the importance of SDO in deconstructing these important social issues. Based on the review of SDO’s social influence, we make some recommendations on future research direction. First, in consideration of the limitation of explicit test of SDO (e.g. social desirability), implicit test should be developed to avoid these disadvantages and further the understand of the nature of SDO. Second, social context and social behavior should be integrated into the study of SDO in order to solve the controversy of the question whether SDO is a stable trait. Third, SDO should be brought into the topic of social problem solving and further the study of social distance at the same time of narrowing the gap between social groups in China.