What matters most to prejudice: Big Five personality, Social Dominance Orientation, or Right‐Wing Authoritarianism?

Abstract

Whereas previous research has studied the relation of either (i) personality with prejudice, (ii) personality with social dominance orientation (SDO) and right‐wing authoritarianism (RWA), or (iii) SDO and RWA with prejudice, the present research integrates all approaches within the same model. In our study (N = 183), various causal models of the relationships among the Big Five, SDO, RWA, and Generalized Prejudice are proposed and tested. Generalized Prejudice scores were obtained from a factor analysis of the scores on various prejudice instruments (racism, sexism, prejudice toward homosexuals, and mentally disabled people), which yielded a one‐factor solution. The best‐fitting causal model, which was our suggested hypothetical model, showed that Big Five personality had no direct effect on Generalized Prejudice but an indirect effect transmitted through RWA and SDO, where RWA seems to capture personality aspects to a greater extent than SDO. Specifically, Generalized Prejudice was affected indirectly by Extraversion, Openness to Experience, and Conscientiousness through RWA, and by Agreeableness through SDO, whereas Neuroticism had no effect at all. The results are discussed against the background of previous research and the personality and social psychology approaches to the study of prejudice. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Personality and Political Attitudes: Relationships across Issue Domains and Political Contexts

“…4 There is an extensive and important body of work examining the relationship between a variety of political attitudes and other characteristic adaptations. These adaptations include, among others, RWA (e.g., Adorno et al 1950;Altemeyer 1996;Ekehammar et al 2004;Feldman 2003;Feldman and Stenner 1997;Hetherington and Weiler 2009;Stenner 2005), SDO (e.g., Ekehammar et al 2004;Sidanius and Pratto 1999;Sidanius, Pratto, and Bobo 1996), Racial Resentment (e.g., Feldman and Huddy 2005;Henry and Sears 2002;Kinder and Mendelberg 2000;Kinder and Sanders 1996;Kinder and Sears 1981;Sniderman and Carmines 1997), and core values (e.g., Goren 2001Goren , 2005Jacoby 2006). Our work contributes to this research by examining (1) how basic dispositional traits-arguably formed prior to these characteristic adaptations-shape political attitudes (another characteristic adaptation) and (2) how the effects of Big Five traits vary across clearly identified contexts.…”

“…These characteristic adaptations, that is, individual-level differences "contextualized in time, situations and social roles" (McAdams and Pals 2006, 208;also see McCrae andCosta 1994, 1996) encompass an array of aspects of human individuality such as values, attitudes (including political attitudes such as ideology), expectations about one's role in society, and personal goals (McAdams and Pals 2006;McCrae and Costa 2003). In the McAdams and Pals model, these characteristic adaptations, such as RWA and Social Dominance Orientation (SDO; a measure of group-based discrimination), are a product of dispositional traits, such as the Big Five (see Akrami and Ekehammar 2006;Ekehammar et al 2004), and the environment (see Sibley and Duckitt 2008). As such, although some of the adaptations are also quite stable, they are shaped in part by context and may also change in response to contextual changes.…”

Level and change of group-focused enmity in Germany: unconditional and conditional latent growth curve models with four panel waves

“…Besides these inter correlations among different prejudice elements, some studies have presented more profound empirical evidence for generalized prejudice by either developing reliable scales including several prejudices (Guimond, Dambrun, Michinow and Durarte 2003), or by forming a second order factor of several prejudices (Heyder and Schmidt 2003;Ekehammar, Akrami, Gylje and Zakrisson 2004;Bratt 2005). For instance, a highly reliable scale of prejudices against 17 different ethnic out-groups was created by Guimond and his co-workers (2003).…”

Agreeable Authoritarians: Personality and Politics in Contemporary Russia

“…There may also be a negative relationship to openness and agreeableness (Aichholzer and Zandonella 2016) or even all Big Five traits except neuroticism (Ekehammar et al 2004).…”