RWAc and SDOc: The measurement of right‐wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation in childhood

Ruffman, Ted; Ruffman, Charlie; Hill, Sarah; Turunç, Gamze; Park, Jung-Woong; Du, Kangning; Hayhurst, Jill; Kang, Jie; Selçuk, Bilge; Regenbrecht, Holger; Philipp, Michael C.; Hunter, John

doi:10.1111/sode.12438

Cited by 9 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 47 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…TIV is an important variable to account for particularly in ROI-based volumetric measures because such subtle differences in regional brain volume may be confounded by individual differences in overall brain size [ 84 ]. We are also controlling for age not only because TIV varies as a function of age [ 85 ], but also because both RWA and SDO have been shown to decrease with age [ 1 , 42 ]. Accounting for age is also necessitated in this study because the analysis will include participants from two different age groups, a young adult sample and a middle-aged adult sample.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In other words, people vary in their levels of RWA and SDO. These differences tend to decrease with age but show reasonable consistency in adult samples [42]. Despite being measured as separate scales in most research, some have raised the possibility that the correlation between RWA and SDO might denote that they can be subsumed to a uni-dimensional spectrum [43,44]; for opposing views, see [30,45].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Neuroanatomical correlates of system-justifying ideologies: a pre-registered voxel-based morphometry study on right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation

et al. 2023

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

System-justifying ideologies are a cluster of ideals that perpetuate a hierarchical social system despite being fraught with inequalities. Right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) and social dominance orientation (SDO) are two ideologies that have received much attention in the literature separately and together. Given that these ideologies are considered to be stable individual differences that are likely to have an evolutionary basis, there has yet to be any examination for volumetric brain structures associated with these variables. Here, we proposed an investigation of overlapping and non-overlapping brain regions associated with RWA and SDO in a sample recruited in Singapore. Indeed, it will be interesting to determine how RWA and SDO correlate in a country that proactively promotes institutionalized multi-culturalism such as Singapore. RWA and SDO scores were collected via self-report measures from healthy individuals (39 males and 43 females; age 25.89 ± 5.68 years). Consequently, voxel-based morphometry (VBM) whole brain and region of interest (ROI) analyses were employed to identify neuroanatomical correlates of these system-justifying ideologies. RWA and SDO scores were strongly correlated despite the low ideological contrast in Singapore's sociopolitical context. The whole brain analysis did not reveal any significant clusters associated with either RWA or SDO. The ROI analyses revealed clusters in the bilateral amygdala and ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) that were associated with both RWA and SDO scores, whereas two clusters in the left anterior insula were negatively associated with only SDO scores. The study corroborates the claim of RWA and SDO as stable individual differences with identifiable neuroanatomical correlates, but our exploratory analysis suggests evidence that precludes any definitive conclusion based on the present evidence.

show abstract

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Neuroanatomical correlates of system-justifying ideologies: a pre-registered voxel-based morphometry study on right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation

et al. 2023

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Three other findings suggest the presence of early individual differences in proto‐political expressions of social dominance. First, Ruffman and colleagues (2020) adapted an adult self‐report measure of SDO for use with children and found that SDO scores among 9‐ to 12‐year‐old children correlated with their mothers' levels of SDO (and authoritarianism). We note, however, that this self‐report measure had low reliability among the 6‐ to 8‐year‐olds in their sample and was thus not included in analyses.…”

Section: What Is Political Ideology?mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Another means of testing whether the individual differences in young children's proto‐political attitudes are early expressions of ideological orientation is to test whether these individual differences predict the outcomes that authoritarianism has been shown to predict among adults. Following this logic, Ruffman and colleagues (2020) tested the validity of a child‐friendly adaptation of an adult authoritarianism self‐report measure by exploring this adapted measure's associations with outcomes favored by authoritarian adults. Indeed, 6‐ to 12‐year‐old children's responses on this new scale were associated with a preference to play with an ingroup over an outgroup member and with a conventional over a nonconventional individual (based on physical appearance).…”

Section: What Is Political Ideology?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Political Ideology in Early Childhood: Making the Case for Studying Young Children in Political Psychology

Reifen‐Tagar

Cimpian

2022

Political Psychology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Research in political psychology largely ignores early childhood. This is likely due to the assumption that young children lack the cognitive capacity and social understanding needed for political thought. Challenging this assumption, we argue that research with young children is both possible and important for political psychologists. We focus on the topic of political ideology to demonstrate our argument. We review recent evidence revealing that social cognition in early childhood—and even infancy—is already oriented toward group living in ways that set the foundation of political thought. Young children notice key dimensions of group living (e.g., group boundaries, hierarchies, norms) and use them to guide their reasoning and behavior. Beyond these basic proto‐political sensitivities, young children also display proto‐political attitudes: valenced and/or prescriptive cognitions about dimensions of group living that have political significance (e.g., disliking nonconforming group members, believing that hierarchy between groups is wrong). Even more reminiscent of mainstream political psychology, young children's proto‐political sensitivities and attitudes exhibit systematic individual differences that can roughly be mapped onto three ideological orientations common among adults: authoritarianism, social dominance, and hawkish ideology. We discuss ways in which research with young children is critical for a complete understanding of adult political psychology.

show abstract

“…An emerging field of research has suggested that differences related to political orientation can be detected very early in life [38,39] and parents' ideology, through both genes and socialization, may affect their children's ideology precursors [40][41][42][43][44]. In other words, children of conservative parents seem to differ from children of liberal parents, displaying a set of characteristics predisposing either to conservatism or to liberalism.…”

Section: The Antecedents Of Inequality Aversionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Children’s inequality aversion in intergroup contexts: The role of parents’ social dominance orientation, right-wing authoritarianism and moral foundations

2021

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Although children are overall sensitive to inequality and prefer fair allocation of resources, they also often display ingroup favouritism. Inquiring about the factors that can shape the tension between these two driving forces in children, we focused on the role of parents. Extending the limited literature in this field, the present work examined whether individual differences in 3-to 11-year-old White children’s (N = 154, 78 boys) evaluations of fair versus pro-ingroup behaviours in an intergroup context vary as a function of both mothers’ and fathers’ social dominance orientation (SDO), right-wing authoritarianism (RWA), and moral foundations. Parents completed a questionnaire. Children were presented with a scenario in which two ingroup members distributed candies to two other children, one White and one Black, either in an egalitarian way or displaying a clear ingroup favouritism. Afterwards, their attitudes towards the two ingroup members who had distributed the candies were assessed through both an Implicit Association Test and explicit questions. Although children displayed on average an explicit preference for the fair over the pro-ingroup target, this preference did not emerge at the implicit level. Most importantly, both children’s explicit and implicit attitudes were related to mothers’ SDO, indicating that at increasing level of mothers’ SDO children’s inequality aversion tended to drop. Overall, these results emphasize the relevance of mothers’ support for social hierarchy in relation to the way in which children balance the two competing drives of equality endorsement and pro-ingroup bias.

show abstract

RWAc and SDOc: The measurement of right‐wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation in childhood

Cited by 9 publications

References 47 publications

Neuroanatomical correlates of system-justifying ideologies: a pre-registered voxel-based morphometry study on right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation

Neuroanatomical correlates of system-justifying ideologies: a pre-registered voxel-based morphometry study on right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation

Political Ideology in Early Childhood: Making the Case for Studying Young Children in Political Psychology

Children’s inequality aversion in intergroup contexts: The role of parents’ social dominance orientation, right-wing authoritarianism and moral foundations

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About