As we saw in the preceding chapter, a number of classical and contemporary theories of social attitudes and intergroup relations have given us some important insights into the nature and dynamics of intergroup conflict, stereotyping, and group oppression. However, there has yet to be a serious effort to integrate these insights into one coherent and comprehensive theoretical model. In an effort to accomplish this and gain a firmer purchase on the almost boringly repetitive nature of human oppression, we have developed social dominance theory (SDT). While this approach is new in many ways, its primary virtue is that it ties together the most critical and useful components and models reviewed in Chapter 1. The most important sources for our new synthesis can be found in the ideas of (a) authoritarian personality theory, (b) Rokeach's two-value theory of political behavior, (c) Blumer's group positions theory, (d) Marxism and neoclassical elite theories, (e) results from political attitude and public opinion research, (f) social identity theory (SIT), and (g) modern thinking within evolutionary psychology While SDT has been influenced by models within personality psychology, social psychology, and political sociology, it is neither strictly a psychological nor a sociological theory, but rather an attempt to connect the worlds of individual personality and attitudes with the domains of institutional behavior and social structure. Thus, SDT is an attempt to integrate several levels of analysis into one coherent theoretical framework.

Despite tremendous effort and what appear to be our best efforts stretching over hundreds of years, discrimination, oppression, brutality, and tyranny remain all too common features of the human condition. Far from having escaped the grip of human ugliness in the civil rights revolutions of the 1960s, we seem only to have increased the overall level of chaos, confusion, and intergroup truculence during the post-civil rights era and the resolution of the cold war. We see signs of this brutality and oppression all around us, from the streets of Los Angeles and Brooklyn to the hills of Bosnia and the forests of Rwanda. Rather than resolving the problems of intergroup hostility, we merely appear to stumble from viciousness to viciousness. Why?

While some journalists and poets have written astute and penetrating descriptions of this nearly ubiquitous barbarism, it is primarily social scientists who have tried to construct a theoretical understanding of these phenomena. As a result, the social science literature on the interrelated topics of stereotyping, prejudice, intergroup relations, gender, race, and class discrimination has become enormous.

Systems of group-based social hierarchy and oppression do not just fall from the sky, nor do they merely result from the accidents and vicissitudes of human history. Rather, while the proximal forces constructing and maintaining oppressive systems are complex and multifaceted, they are also the expressions of human will, agency, and mind. However, perhaps psychology's greatest insight is that the human mind both forms and is formed by human society. Therefore, understanding the nature and dynamics of group-based social inequality requires that we understand the psychology of group dominance. In this chapter we will argue that one of the ways in which this psychology of group dominance expresses itself is in a form we call social dominance orientation (SDO).

SDO is defined as a very general individual differences orientation expressing the value that people place on nonegalitarian and hierarchically structured relationships among social groups. It expresses general support for the domination of certain socially constructed groups over other socially constructed groups, regardless of the manner in which these groups are defined. These groups may be defined on the basis of race, sex, nationality, ethnicity, religion, social class, region, skin color, clan, caste, lineage, tribe, minimal groups, or any other group distinction that the human mind is capable of constructing. Individuals differ in the degree to which they desire group-based inequality and dominance for any number of reasons.

At the beginning of this book, we described group dominance societies as characterized by three distinct but interlocking forms of social group dominance: one based on an arbitrary-set distinction, one based on gender, and one based on age or, more specifically, the adult-child distinction. Understanding how the gender system relates to each of the other two dominance systems will reveal some important details about how group dominance societies work: why they contain each of the three forms of group dominance that they do, and how each form sustains and is sustained by the others. In this chapter we examine gender within dominance societies. In doing this, we explore gender differences in psychological orientations toward group dominance, political behavior, social roles that enhance or attenuate arbitrary-set hierarchy, sexual relationships, and parent-child relationships. In this exploration, we will provide theoretical and empirical evidence to substantiate our claim that gender is not simply another arbitrary-set distinction, but has unique properties not associated with that distinction. Although we do not reduce the psychology of gender to the psychology of arbitrary sets, we will argue that the psychology of gender is a crucial component of the psychology of intergroup politics. Finally, we will also provide a theoretical explanation for the subordinate male target phenomenon documented in many studies of institutional discrimination. To accomplish these goals, we will employ the conceptual framework of contemporary evolutionary psychology.

In Part III we showed that discrimination makes a substantial and pervasive contribution to the unequal distribution of social resources and the subsequent establishment or maintenance of group-based hierarchy. However, there is another source of inequality besides discrimination. In this chapter we will argue that group-based social hierarchy is also maintained because people from dominant and subordinate groups actually behave differently. These behavioral differences are both a consequence of social hierarchy and a proximal cause of it.

Our analysis of group differences in behavior stems not from the assumption that there are basic or normal human proclivities that go awry in subordinate groups, or from the notion that people in dominant and subordinate groups have inherently different qualities or capacities. Rather, we argue that the behavioral differences between dominant and subordinate groups result from the fact that people within these groups live in profoundly different circumstances. Group-hierarchical societies are set up in ways that make life relatively easy for dominants and relatively difficult for subordinates. We saw clear evidence of this in Part III dealing with the “circle of oppression” and the pervasive group-based discrimination faced by subordinates. Less obvious, but still influential, are the ways that the most basic cultural, social, economic, and psychological tasks of life are made more difficult for subordinates and easier for dominants. These social conditions influence the psychological states and local social conditions of everyone in the society, causing, we argue, group differences in behavior, particularly in behavior that influences how well people do in life.

One of the primary means by which societies produce and maintain group-based social hierarchy is through the use of institutional discrimination. By institutional discrimination we are talking about the way that social institutions such as schools, businesses, and government bureaucracies disproportionately allocate positive social value (e.g., high social status, good health care, good housing) to dominants and disproportionately allocate negative social value (low social status, poor housing, long prison sentences, torture, and executions) to subordinates.

There are at least two major distinctions one may make concerning institutional discrimination: individual-mediated and standard-of-practice-mediated institutional discrimination. In addition, one may distinguish between overt and covert institutional discrimination.

Individual-mediated institutional discrimination may be said to occur when individuals with biased, or dominance-oriented, attitudes and beliefs allow these to influence the decisions they make and the actions they take as agents of public or private institutions. For example, a highly prejudiced loan officer might decide not to grant a home mortgage loan to an Asian-American family for no other reason than the fact that he or she dislikes Asians. Standard-of-practice institutional discrimination occurs when an institution's rules and procedures have discriminatory effect, even if it is claimed that there is no discriminatory intent. For example, a fire department might have regulations stipulating that no one may be hired who is not able to carry a sixty-five-pound hose up a two-story ladder within 20 seconds.

Our work on social dominance theory (SDT) has focussed on trying to answer two related questions: Why is group-based social dominance so common, and why is it so difficult to eliminate? In attempting to answer these two questions, we presume that, despite major and sometimes profound differences between societies and cultures, there is also a basic grammar and deep structure of social power that is shared by all societies. Our work on SDT has been devoted to identifying what this grammar and deep structure consist of.

The historical and anthropological record suggests that most human societies contain three distinct but interlocking hierarchical systems: gender, age, and arbitrary sets, that is, the contextually dependent and arbitrarily defined social distinctions based on factors such as ethnicity, race, class, tribe, and nation. We have argued that these three systems of group-based dominance are not interchangeable or equivalent, but rather constitute three interlocking and mutually interdependent structural components of social life. Systems of group-based social dominance occur across a wide variety of historical periods, economies, and technologies. While gender and age hierarchies appear to be essentially universal across all known societies, arbitrary-set hierarchies largely occur only in societies in which people are able to generate and sustain an economic surplus. The consequent social stratification among arbitrary sets then further contributes to gender inequality and the establishment of patriarchy. For example, whe the bush-living !Kung produced only enough to sustain themselves, they had a fairly flat social structure, with few status or power distinctions between men and women, among different groups, or even between adults and children.

Because the nature of one's work is strongly tied to one's general perceived worth in society, work will also be an important determinant of one's general well-being and social status. By institutionalizing the differential allocation of various kinds of jobs to different social groups, societies create and maintain group-based social dominance.

In this chapter we examine evidence concerning the second arc in the circle of oppression, employment discrimination. In addition to arguing that disparate outcomes in employment are a major cause of group dominance, this review will enable us to test certain key theoretical hypotheses. First, we will test social dominance theory's (SDT's) prediction that institutional discrimination is systematically directed against women. Second, we will test SDT's prediction that discrimination against subordinate men is greater than that against subordinate women, the subordinate male target hypothesis (SMTH). Third, by surveying studies conducted across as many societies as have been systematically studied, we can then explore the robustness of gender discrimination, arbitrary-set discrimination, and the SMTH across different nations and particular dominance-subordinate relations.

A secondary goal of this review is to examine possible factors that will either mitigate or exacerbate employment discrimination. In addition, this review will allow us to assess other theoretical explanations for employment discrimination, as well as to reveal where further research on employment discrimination is needed. As in the preceding chapter, we will begin this exploration with soft evidence and then progress to increasingly harder evidence of employment discrimination against members of subordinate groups.