We will hunt them down: How social dominance orientation and right-wing authoritarianism fuel ethnic persecution of immigrants in fundamentally different ways

By Lotte Thomsen, E. Green, J. Sidanius. 2008

326 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Despite the fact that SDO and RWA are correlated with one another and both predict support for ethnic persecution of immigrants, it is argued that this aggression is provoked for very different reasons. For authoritarians, outgroup aggression against immigrants should primarily be provoked by immigrant refusal to assimilate into the dominant culture because this violates ingroup conformity. In contrast, SDO should be associated with aggression against immigrants who do assimilate into the dominant culture because this blurs existing status boundaries between groups. Using samples of American and Swiss college students, the data were consistent with this status boundary enforcement hypothesis regarding social dominators and largely consistent with the ingroup conformity hypothesis regarding authoritarians. National and ethnic identification did not account for these results. The results further support the argument that outgroup prejudice and discrimination is most fruitfully seen as an interactive function of individual differences and situational constraints.

Subfields: Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0c63677ae42f25655bd501928ff5d843243d8a6d

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Citations in the corpus

Right‐wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation and the dimensions of generalized prejudice: A longitudinal test (2010, background): “Thomsen et al. (2008), for instance, reported that RWA and SDO predicted prejudice against immigrants for very different reasons: People high in RWA supported ethnic persecution of, and aggression towards, immigrant group members when they were described as not intending to assimilate to the host…”
Status boundary enforcement and the categorization of black–white biracials (2013, background): “Thomsen et al. (2008) demonstrated that perceptions that immigrants were trying to assimilate to the American mainstream, and thus “trespass” existing group boundaries, led Americans high in SDO to support immigrant persecution.”
Right–Wing Authoritarianism and Social Dominance Orientation Differentially Moderate Intergroup Effects on Prejudice (2010, background): “And third, it provided information about the outgroup that manipulated these three intergroup conditions directly as opposed to earlier studies which merely inferred change in these intergroup conditions from overtly different manipulations (e.g. an immigrant who was assimilating or not assimilating”
An experimental approach to Intergroup Threat Theory: Manipulations, moderators, and consequences of realistic vs. symbolic threat (2018, background): “Furthermore, people high in SDO exhibit more prejudice against immigrants who assimilate to the “mainstream” culture, presumably because assimilating has the potential to make immigrants more competitive with the ingroup (Thomsen et al., 2008).”
Retribution as Revenge and Retribution as Just Deserts (2013, background): “Consistent with an in-group conformity hypothesis (Thomsen et al., 2008), high RWA individuals sought to restore values in society and the latter mediated their preferences for retribution as just deserts (H4).”
The Authoritarian Dynamic During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Effects on Nationalism and Anti-Immigrant Sentiment (2020, background): “Indeed, both RWA and SDO predict an increased willingness to engage in the active persecution of immigrants, though the situations that prime this response in people high in RWA and SDO are different: Those high in RWA are more willing to engage in the active persecution of immigrants who are unwill”
Social Dominance Theory: Explorations in the Psychology of Oppression (2016, unknown): “For example, Thomsen et al. (2008) showed that while Right-Wing Authoritarianism Scale Table 8.1 (cont.)”
The Aggression-Submission-Conventionalism Scale: Testing a New Three Factor Measure of Authoritarianism (2016, unknown): “This division is also consistent with Duckitt’s (2001) Dual Process Model (see also Duckitt & Sibley, 2010; Thomsen et al., 2008).”
When and How Subordinate Performance Leads to Abusive Supervision: A Social Dominance Perspective (2018, background): “In an interesting study attempting to understand ethnic persecution, Thomsen et al. (2008) demonstrated support for what they referred to as the “status boundary enforcement hypothesis.””
What determines attitudes to immigration in European countries? An analysis at the regional level (2013, background): “In addition, opinions towards ethnic diversity have been found to be highly correlated with intergroup relations (McIntosh et al. 1995; Thomsen et al. 2008; Cohrs and Stelzl 2010; Duckitt and Sibley 2010; Morrison et al. 2010).”
Living under threat: Mutual threat perception drives anti‐Muslim and anti‐Western hostility in the age of terrorism (2018, result): “…orientation or a sense of individual and group insignificance would have been beneficial as they have predicted support for extreme intergroup violence in previous research (Jasko, LaFree, & Kruglanski, 2016; Levin et al., 2015; Levin et al., 2012; Sidanius et al., 2004, 2016; Thomsen et al, 2008).”