Social Dominance Theory: Group-Based Social Dominance Theory

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Social psychology provides several explanations for the way people view economic inequality and how they react to the large disparities between the rich and the poor. One of the most prominent theories on economic inequality is the social dominance theory. The social dominance theory as explained by Felicia Pratto is a theory of intergroup relations that focuses on the maintenance of group-based social hierarchies. According to the social dominance theory, it does not matter what the form of government is, belief systems or the economic and social arrangements, societies organize based on group hierarchies. Group-based social hierarchies favor dominant groups in society over subordinate groups, leaving those in dominant groups with positive …show more content…

Among these legitimising myths falls two subcategories; they are hierarchy enhancing and hierarchy attenuating. A hierarchy enhancing myth refers to ideas such as racism, sexism, stereotypes and Manifest Destiny and typically leads to great levels of group-based inequalities. Whereas the hierarchy-attenuating myth refers to political doctrines such as feminism, communism, socialism and social democracy, which tend to lead to greater group-based equality. Hierarchy enhancing is also used when explaining institutional discrimination. Institutional discrimination explains inequality because institutions have more funds and resources. Institutions also have a larger reach, discrimination of one institution leads to discrimination throughout generations of that institution and institutions have their own internal norms. Due to hierarchy-enhancing, institutions are influenced and tend to favor the more affluent groups over the subordinate groups. Individual discrimination is also a part of the social dominance theory, because people who fall within the more affluent groups have more resources to allocate to individuals than those of the lower more subordinate classes therefore those who are more affluent tend to have more power, leading to a great increase

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