The Fire of the Seas: A Novel About the Bitter Discrimination in Our Society

This article aims to discuss about the topic of discrimination and elaborate it through the form of a creative novel. Three topics are explored: the reasons for discrimination, how discrimination can continue to perpetuate, and how indirect discrimination can also hurt victims. These questions are answered in the narrative story in a novel with the help of the Social Dominance theory and Becker’s theory of Economic Discrimination. Sapphire is a fire-wielding mermaid who is discriminated against because of her power over fire. She finds out that discrimination can exist because the dominant group does not want to lose their privileges, and how discrimination still runs rampant because of the propaganda spread by the king, which is supported using the legalizing myths in Social Dominance theory. Sapphire also witnesses and suffers some indirect forms of discrimination, especially about lack of interaction and wage differences.Keywords: discrimination, indirect discrimination, social dominance, economic discrimination, fantasy, merfolk

Celebrating While Black: NFL Quarterbacks Perceived as Representing Black Culture are Judged as More Arrogant

Prior work has shown that confident behavior from Black individuals can be unfairly interpreted as arrogance (the “hubris penalty”). In two studies, we test predictions that the more NFL quarterbacks (QBs) are seen as representing Black culture, the more arrogant they will be judged. In Study 1, Black QBs were rated as more arrogant than White QBs on average, and Black and White QBs who were judged as more representative of Black culture were rated as more arrogant. Study 2 showed that viewing a QB celebrating increased perceptions of arrogance and led participants to see celebrating as less appropriate when the QB was Black. Findings are consistent with social dominance theory, such that QBs perceived as “representing Blackness” are disproportionately penalized for behaving confidently. Data can be found at https://osf.io/6snad/.

Social Dominance Theory and Power Comparison

This chapter extends classic social comparison research to explain how people think about group-based hierarchies and how they act within them. People spontaneously compare themselves to others in terms of relative status and power, not only as individuals but also as members of groups relative to other groups. Using a social dominance framework, the authors discuss the impact of such comparisons on socio-political attitudes and behavior. Social dominance theory describes how certain attitudes, values, and social practices enhance group hierarchies, whereas other attitudes, values, and social practices are hierarchy-attenuating. Power differentials within any type of group hierarchy are given by the balance between these forces that play out at three levels of analysis: in societal institutions (macro level), in intergroup relations (meso level), and among different individuals (micro level). The authors discuss not only how social comparisons shape hierarchy-enhancing and hierarchy-attenuating outcomes at each level but also how these outcomes, in turn, can mute the natural consequences of group-based power comparisons.

Social Dominance Orientation (SDO)

Human societies tend to structure themselves as group-based social hierarchies such that some groups enjoy greater access to fitness-relevant resources such as prestige, wealth, social status, healthcare, food, homes, mates, and so on. Social Dominance Theory (SDT, Sidanius & Pratto, 1999) asks the questions why and how group-based hierarchies are continuously reproduced, at least among surplus-producing societies. The theoretical framework spans macro-structural, institutional, ideological, social role, individual, and behavioural genetic levels of analysis to address this question and postulates that humans have a predisposition to navigate group-based social structures (Kleppestø et al., 2019; Kunst, Fischer, Sidanius, & Thomsen, 2017; Pratto, Sidanius, & Levin, 2006; Sidanius, Cotterill, Sheehy-Skeffington, Kteily, & Carvacho, 2016; Sidanius & Pratto, 1999).

Not All Entrepreneurs are Viewed Equally: A Social Dominance Theory Perspective on Access to Capital

Drawing on social dominance theory, the present research examines how the characteristics of a potential investor – namely, social dominance orientation (SDO) (i.e. the degree to which individuals seek to maintain inequality between groups) interacts with the characteristics of the entrepreneur (i.e. race) to influence capital decision-making. Study 1 found that as a function of individuals’ SDO, individuals supported a policy that would increase funding access to White but not minority entrepreneurs. Study 2 found that as a function of SDO, individuals were willing to invest in White but not minority-owned firms. The perceived threat of the entrepreneur’s success to the extant racial hierarchy explained differences in investment decisions. The present research in the field of entrepreneurship is the first to apply Social Dominance Theory and Social Dominance Orientation (Sidanius, J., and F. Pratto. 1999. Social Dominance: An Intergroup Theory of Social Hierarchy and Oppression. New York: Cambridge University Press.), which have received much attention in social psychology and organizational behavior, to funding access and investment decisions. In doing so, these studies answer the call by (Klotz, A. C., and D. O. Neubaum. 2016. “Research on the Dark Side of Personality Traits in Entrepreneurship: Observations from an Organizational Behavior Perspective.” Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice 40 (1): 7–17.) to examine the relationship between “darker” personality traits, such as SDO, and entrepreneurial outcomes.

The Theory of Gendered Prejudice: A Social Dominance and Intersectionalist Perspective

Over the last twenty-five years or so, there has been a growing awareness among race and gender scholars that a fully adequate analysis of these two forms of societal oppression cannot be done in isolation from one another. That is, an understanding of racism and sexism is fundamentally incomplete without an appreciation of how race and gender intersect and interact with one another in the creation and maintenance of group-based hierarchy and oppression. This chapter argues that while intersectionalist and critical race theorists have qualitatively (and occasionally quantitatively) drawn attention to the fact that the racial and gender dimensions of oppression are both interactively implicated in the maintenance of group-based inequality, a fully satisfactory empirical analysis of the dynamics of racism and sexism has yet to be achieved. Using the theoretical frameworks of evolutionary psychology and social dominance theory (SDT), this chapter offers an alternative understanding of the intersectional entanglement of racism and sexism. This chapter introduces the theory of gendered prejudice, a derivative of SDT, and posits that a satisfactory account of racism, or what social dominance theorists generalize as “arbitrary-set” oppression, is a deeply gendered phenomenon.