Are You A Social Dominator? Take the Test and Find Out. Liberals, Tea Partyers, and Conservatives - Take Note. [97*-53]

IF THE FOLLOWING HIGH profile Conservatives took the quiz below, I suspect, but don't know, that all of them would score above 90%: Newt Gingrich, John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Rick Perry, Rick Santorum, Paul Ryan, and Eric Cantor. Ones who I think would score lower would be Michelle Bachmann, Sarah Palin, Ron Huntsmand, Scott Brown, Ron Paul, and Mitt Romney; I haven't a clue regarding Herman Cain.

So, what is a Social Dominator Orientation (SDO)? Wikipedia says: "Individuals who score high in SDO desire to maintain and, in many cases, increase the differences between social statuses of different groups, as well as individual group members. Typically, they are dominant, driven, tough, and relatively uncaring seekers of power. Often, people who score high in SDO adhere strongly to belief in a "dog-eat-dog" world."; they are often leaders, either directly or of opinion ... think Rush Limbaugh. It is very important to understand SDOs because they lead a large segment of the American population; their army is largely made up of another group of people who have a different psychological profile called Right-wing Authoritarian (RWA) followers. I have written about RWAs in several other hubs.

The idea of Social Dominance Orientation derives from Social Dominance Theory (SDT), which attempts to explain why group-based inequalities and group-based social hierarchies in the world are so darn stable. According to SDT, individual people differ on the extent to which they desire group-based inequality. That is why so many questions in the quiz below are oriented in that direction. Also, as you may guess, this deals with social conservatism rather than fiscal conservatism; you can be quite fiscally conservative while still be rather socially liberal.

Research has shown that these social hirarchies can be classified into three types, age-based, gender-based, and culturally definded-based. Examples are, adults are held in higher esteem and have more power than children; men have more power and higher social status than women; White Americans have more power and higher social status, than Black Americans. The higher an individual ranks on the SDO scale, the more they believe this is the way things ought to be.

People who rank high on the SDO scale can come from all parts of society, but, are most often seen associated with fundementalist-oriented religious groups of all flavors and conservative politics. In politics, an SDO often professes a strong religious belief, but a high scoring SDO is only using this as a means to an end, it is the power they are seeking and the social order they are trying to maintain, not subserviance to a Supreme Being. That is not saying they are atheist, it is only saying religion is sometimes not as important in their lives as their claims would lead one to believe.

There is nothing particularly or necessarily mean in their outlook, at least in a purposeful way; this is just what they think "normal" ought to be. In 500 B.C.E., no one thought twice about the aborhent nature of slavery, including the slaves themselves; it was just the natural order of things. Of course, this isn't the way we think today, but it was then. SDOs are surprised when they are told their behaviour may be anti-social; they simply don't see it that way and by any measure, they are psychologically normal.

A BIG ONE! For the most part, they run the Repubican party today and the RWA's make up their army of followers. It didn't use to be that way. Prior to 1980, the Republican party was largely in control of those who would probably score between 50% and 80% on my quiz below.

On the other hand, RWAs, Right-wing Authoritarian followers that make up a large part of the hard-core of the Conservative movement, were around in probably the same numbers prior to 1980, as they are after 1980. The difference is the authority figures they follow were prone to follow are the Social Dominators who, prior to 1980, were in the minority and they largely sat on the sidelines. With Ronald Reagan and the Christian Coalition, that all changed.

As the SDO leaders began to take control of the Republican party in the 1980s and 1990s, the army of RWA supporters came off the sidelines and entered politics in a huge way, either as politicians themselves or as voters and activists and most recently, Tea Party members. By 2000, probably earlier, the SDOs finally dominated the Republican party. (BTW, I wouldn't say either of the Bush's were SDO's, but Vice President Cheney probably was.) One of the fallout's of that sea-change in the political landscape is the political gridlock on Capital Hill; a characteristics of how SDOs play politics.

I JUST FINISHED MY research on Right-wing Authoritarian (RWA) followers, the army of the Social Dominators. I say "army" because it is this group of people who have this particular psychological make-up that are particularly willing to follow, without question, the Social Dominator. Studies by Professor Robert Altemeyer have shown, via surveys, that the median score on his RWA assessment for American State legislators, he is Canadian, for Democrats to be about 92, while the Republicans had median score of around 117; an average score on the scale is 100. (Not to be outdone, Altemeyer found that the Canadian legislators had medians around 65 and 115, respectively; it would seem the Canadian New Democrats make our Democrats look almost conservative; Rush Limbaugh would be apocalyptic if he lived there.)

BTW, conservatives don't have a lock on this RWA and SD phenomenon. Liberals can show the same score high on both scales as well, just not in anywhere the same numbers; the only ones that seem to be immune are us moderates.

I bring this up, because in the same surveys, Professor Altemeyer also asked questions that would give him some ideas of the legislatures degree of social dominance as the scale had not been formally developed yet. What he found was that many of the high scoring RWA legislators would also be high scoring SDs. This was not surprising to him because one of the principal characteristics of an SD is the drive to power and being elected to political office is clearly on the path to this goal. A person who scores high on both the RWA and SD assessments is called a "Double High" and, if allowed to reach his or her pinnacle of success can wreck societal havoc; history is full of unfortunate examples.

More in future hubs.

I ADMIT IT, I fear what SDOs will do to America, even setting the "Double High" phenomenon aside. Even though there is nothing intrinsically evil in having a Social Dominator orientation; it is, in my view, antithetical to what America is all about; it violates the core values of what America is supposed to project to ourselves and the world. To have the attributes that come with a SDO can be of great benefit to those who want to become captains of industry, corporations are run by a lot of SDO individuals. Those same attributes in a politician and their followers, however, can be devastating to the cause of liberty.

Americans have always prided themselves on using reason and logic to come to the proper conclusions in life; SDOs shun this and RWAs follow them. To me a clear example of what I am talking about is in my hub "Who has the better Employment and Job Growth Record? Conservatives or Moderate/Liberals (1945 - 2008)". In my mind, the moderate/liberals, when in power, have done a demonstrably better job at handling America's economy and I present pretty stark statistics to back up that hypothesis; it simply isn't even a closs call. Yet, out of the 6 people who have voted in my poll, 2 disagreed that the Conservatives do a poorer job in managing the economy. This is a primary characteristic of both SDOs and RWAs, denial of the assertion when the supporting facts are clear and convincing. More simplistic, if they believed 1 + 1 = 3, and not 2, then neither heaven nor hell will convince them otherwise. If difference between SDOs and RWAs, however, is the SDOs know 1 + 1 = 2, while the RWA will only believe it when their particular SDO leader says to believe it.

History is full of examples of SDO personalities who rose to power only to become dictators and tyrants; some ended up being megalomaniacs, an entirely different condition, and wrecked great havoc and misery on those they ruled. The same is true when groups of people who exhibit these traits raise to power; think the Soviet Politburo. Whether SDO or not, it goes without question, the leadership of virtually every totalitarian society, whether good or evil, would probable max out the SDO scale.

I firmly believe, those in the Conservative movement who are SDOs and are in power today, exhibit those same tendencies; whether they know it or not, it is just part of their nature; that is how they simply see life and they think it is correct. If we are continue as a free society, Americans must understand this danger, and no, I don't see us becoming a dictatorship, but I do see a severe restriction on individual liberties if today's Conservatives gain and maintain power in this country. At stake are parts of the 1st, IVth, Vth, VIth VIIIth, and XIVth Amendments to the Constitution; there has already been talk from the current set of Conservatives that these Amendment go too far and need to be limited to "what the founding fathers meant them to be" or that they are in violation of the principals of the "founding fathers"; to me, this is very scary talk; to an SDO, it makes all of the sense in the world.

BECAUSE I CANNOT link the SDI survey results with the participants political persuasion, I can only deal hypothetically as to whether there is a relation, in other words, I can show you roughly what it would be like IF there were some sort of relationship between political orientation and Social Dominator orientation. Other studies I have read and presented show this to be the case, but the Hub polling and survey instruments are too limited to make this convinient to accomplish.

Below are two Chi-Square tables; Chi-Square is a statistical technique to determine the hypothothisis of whether there is a statistically significant relationship between two events or not. I can't do that in this case because I don't know from our sample which person who scored a certain way on the SDO survey

Table 1 represents the hypothetical distribution of results IF there was ZERO bias because of political orientation or any other factor; this table is actually part of a real statistical analysis. The fourth column represents how many people should score in each percent grouping based on the 31 votes cast so far. The fifth column represents how those 50 votes are actually distributed in my sample.

Because there are now more then 30 responses, I can begin saying, with some degree of statistical certainty that there IS bias somewhere; the question is, of course, where. I don't believe I need to bore you with numbers at this point, because it should be extremely obvious just by comparing the two columns.

Table 2 presents a hypothetical distribution we might see from our survey if there was the kind of bias toward Conservative orientation that I know exists. What happens in a real analysis is a difference is taken, squared, and further manipulated. The results are compared to some statistical tables which will determine, within a predetermined degree of certainty, if a relationship exists.

The problem I have is that the mechanics of hubpage polling doesn't let me, easily at least, ask a given respondent what group there SD survey results fell into and, at the same time, what their political orientation is. If I could, then I could do some neat statistical analysis to test whether political orientation actually does correlate with SD ratings. Instead, I must now infer a relationship based on what the numbers are telling me and what makes common sense.

First, let me note that even considering the reticince one might have of reporting, albeit anonomously, a very high score like 95% or higher, I am not surprised it is zero; extreme SD's are rare indeed. I do appreciate those two readers, so far, who did report their relatively high scores, and want to thank them for the information.

If you have read the survey questions, it should be obvious Liberals would generally not answer them in such a way as to score high on this survey because most of the ideas contained in those questions run counter to a liberal philosophy. Consequently, it would be very reasonable to assume that most of the 22 self-identified Liberals scored somewhere between 0 and 40%. You cannot say the opposite about those who identified themselves as Moderate or Conservative with anywhere near the same amount of certainty; you may suspect it, but you can't say it, at this point in time, like you can about the Liberals, e.g., you can't say it would be very reasonable to expect Conservatives to score between 60 and 100%, it simply wouldn't be true.

What can you say? At the moment, with only 18 Moderate and Conservate responses, you can't say much; just hint at it. So, what I will hint at is that the data is beginning to show there might be a relationship between political orientation and SD orientation. I say this because IF Liberals account for most of the survey results between 0 and 40%, then it stands to reason that the Moderates and Conservatives are spread among the higher scores. There are, at the moment, 10 scores 41% or greater and, as I suggested, it is highly unlikely that Liberals were the ones who ended up with those results. Therefore, I can infer that the Moderates and Conservatives did.

If you have questions, please leave a comment, you know I will answer, lol.