Social Dominance Theory

Social dominance theory is a social psychological theory of intergroup relations, initially proposed in 1992 by the social psychology researchers Jim Sidanius, Erik Devereux and Felicia Pratto, that examines the caste-like features of group-based social hierarchies and how those hierarchies remain stable and perpetuate themselves. The theory holds that group-based inequality is maintained through three mechanisms working together, institutional discrimination, aggregated individual discrimination and behavioral asymmetry, and that widely shared cultural ideologies it calls legitimizing myths supply the moral and intellectual justification that makes such privilege seem normal. It describes human social hierarchies as taking a three-form, or trimorphic, structure based on age, gender and an arbitrary-set dimension that a given society defines culturally, such as ethnicity, class, caste, religion or nationality, and it argues this hierarchical structure is not unique to humans but shared, including the trimorphic pattern itself, with apes and other primates. The social dominance orientation scale was developed alongside the theory to measure a person's acceptance of and desire for group-based social hierarchy.