A few years back, I – along with three other members of the class – conducted an experiment and had to write a paper about the results. Mind you, it ended up with me doing the vast majority of the research, writing the rough "group" draft of the final paper, and steering us away from the standard twelve question survey for scoring SDO and instead opting to adapt a much older survey (used in the very early stages of the theory) to suit our needs. I want to point out that I was not then, nor am I now, qualified to write my own surveys for psychological evaluations.
Anyway, this is another kind of placeholder. I do think it is a decent paper, and if anyone is interested in the survey without the mark-ups for scoring (and what isn't considered), I have a copy of that as well that I can share. Same with the simple regular survey, which takes about one minute to complete. But if you find any of this interesting, I would ask that you give the survey a chance.
Social dominance orientation: The role of gender on evaluation of social hierarchies and social inequality
Timothy McNeil
Roosevelt University
Is there such a thing as equality within a society? There certainly exists the concept, though both institutions and personal value schemes of the individual members often place a hierarchal value on positions and groups of people in stable industrialized cultures (Sidanius & Pratto, 2003). Sidanius & Pratto (2003) state that these types of societies often evince group-based hierarchies where men tend to exercise more public political power than women. Why would such be the case? Sidanius and Pratto (2003) offered Social Dominance Theory (SDT) as a possible explanation for how societies would “create and re-create” social inequalities along arbitrary lines, including gender, racial, and religious differences (p. 207). Without exception, men have been found to be socialized to display a greater proclivity toward physical aggression and violence then do women (Sidanius, Pratto, & Bobo, 1994). It has been suggested that such behavior may be an anthropological remnant of early man’s behavior that allowed for the defense of territory, the conquest of territory, and for both maintaining existing social hierarchies and expanding them to allow for concepts such as caste systems and slavery (Sidanius, Pratto, & Bobo, 1994).
