In five studies we explored how the context in which people think about the social structure and the implications of the social structure for one's in-group affect attitudes toward inequality. In Studies 1 and 2 we found that social dominance orientation (SDO) scores reflect attitudes toward specific types of inequality that are salient in context. Consistent with social identity theory, in Studies 3 to 5 we found that SDO scores reflected the interests of specific group identities. Indeed, when we compared existing privileged and disadvantaged groups, and when we manipulated in-group status, we found that participants held more positive attitudes toward inequality when the in-group was privileged, compared to when the in-group was disadvantaged. Across all of our studies, results were consistent with the contention that attitudes toward inequality are group-specific and depend on the social-structural position of salient in-groups. We discuss the implications of our findings for social dominance theory.

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We examine whether the reason given for a negative outcome influences the likelihood of making gender discrimination attributions. Men and women were given one of four reasons for their ineligibility to attend an event: an explicit gender reason, a reason based on an attribute correlated with gender, that same gender-related reason with explanatory information attached, or they were given no reason. Providing participants with a reason based on a gender-related attribute deflected them from making attributions to gender discrimination, indicating that discrimination attributions can easily be averted. Adding explanatory information to the gender-related reason decreased feelings of injustice, illegitimacy and anger while increasing acceptance of the outcome.

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