Regional Social Dominance Orientation and Right-Wing Authoritarianism predict different types of regional prejudice
Type
conference contribution
Date Issued
2025-10-18
Author(s)
Abstract
Social Dominance Orientation and Right-Wing Authoritarianism are two fundamental ideological attitudes which predict prejudice towards different social groups. Social Dominance Orientation reflects competition-driven values of power, dominance, and superiority, whereas Right-Wing Authoritarianism reflects threat-driven values of collective security, stability, and order. This study investigated the relationship of these regional ideological attitudes with different domains of regional prejudice (i.e., race, sexuality, age) for 250 cities in the United States aggregated across the years 2015 – 2023. Path modeling revealed that regional Social Dominance Orientation predicted prejudice towards Black people, whereas regional Right-Wing Authoritarianism predicted prejudice towards Gay and young people. Importantly, this pattern varies for prejudice measured as outgroup evaluation (outgroup attitude) or measured as difference between in- and outgroup evaluation (bias). For race prejudice Social Dominance Orientation predicted both outgroup attitudes and bias independently. For sexuality and age prejudice Right-Wing Authoritarianism predicted both outgroup attitudes and bias, but the latter relationship was attenuated when controlling for outgroup attitudes. Overall, this study provides an overview, how regional levels of Social Dominance Orientation and Right-Wing Authoritarianism predict prejudice across different domains for different measures of prejudice.