The theory proposes that widely shared cultural ideologies (“legitimizing myths”) provide the moral and intellectual justification for these intergroup behaviors[3] by serving to make privilege normal.
Such arbitrariness can select on ethnicity (e.g., in the US, Bosnia, Asia, Rwanda), class, cast, religion (Sunni versus Shia Islam), nationality, or any other socially constructed category.
[9][10] [11] Social hierarchy is not only seen as a universal human feature – SDT argues there is substantial evidence it is shared, including the theorized trimorphic structure – among apes and other primates.
[15] The social tiers described by multiple intersectional theories of stratification become organized into hierarchies due to forces that SDT believes are best explained in evolutionary psychology to offer high survival value.
Males are more dominant than females, and they possess more political power and occupy higher status positions illustrating the iron law of androcracy.
[31] Hierarchy-attenuating ideologies such as protected rights, universalism, egalitarianism, feminism, and multiculturalism contribute to greater levels of group-based equality.
[32] People endorse these different forms of ideologies based in part on their psychological orientation to accept or reject unequal group relations as measured by the SDO scale.
[38] The relationship between the two theories has been explored by Altemeyer and other researchers such as John Duckitt, who have exploited the greater coverage possible by employing RWA and SDO scales in tandem.
The model theorizes that high SDO individuals react to pecking order competition with groups seen as socially subordinate (unemployment beneficiaries, housewives, handicapped), and view them negatively, whereas RWA does not show any correlation.
[39] Duckitt's research observed that RWA and SDO measures can become more correlated with age, and suggests the hypothesis that the perspectives were acquired independently during socialization and over time become more consistent as they interact with each other.
[41] He predicts that the high correlation between the views of the world as dangerous and competitive emerge from parenting styles tending to covariance along the dimensions of punitiveness and lack of affection.
This “invariance hypothesis” predicts that males will tend to function as hierarchy enforcers; that is, they are more likely to carry out acts of discrimination, such as the systematic terror by police officers, and the extreme example of death squads and concentration camps.
Friedrich Engels viewed ideology and social discourse as employed to keep dominants and subgroups in line, referring to this as "false consciousness", whose political rationalist cure results when masses can evaluate the facts of their situation.
Unlike Marxian sociologists, SDT along with Mosca, Michels, and Pareto together reject reductionism solely to economic causes, and are skeptical of the hoped for class revolution.
Departing from elite theory's near exclusive focus on social structures manipulated by rational actors, SDT follows Pareto's new direction towards examining collective psychological forces, asserting that human behavior is not primarily driven by either reason or logic.